Quote

Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.

John Cowper Powys

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John Cowper Powys
Age: 90 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Shirley
Derbyshire
John C. Powys
Notion
Occupied
Activity
Rulers
Objects
Preacher
Present
Contemplation
Rather
Heads
Life
Object
Putting
Preposterous
Machines
Preachers

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The more money you give to people the better and the less advice.
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It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.
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Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.
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Words cannot be remote from reality when they create reality.
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To a real child anything will serve as a toy.
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This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness.
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Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?
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Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.
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Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.
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The influence of friendship upon culture differs from that of love, in that it assumes the basic idiosyncrasies of personal taste to be unalterable. Love, in spite of all rational knowledge to the contrary, is always in the mood of believing in miracles.
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The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. … The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.
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It is that cricket field that, in all the sharp and bitter moments of life as they come to me now, gives me a sense of wholesome proportion: 'At least I am not playing cricket!
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The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.
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Man is the animal who weeps and laughs - and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back - in a book.
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A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.
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The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.
John Cowper Powys
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Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy.
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