Quote

I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.

Wyndham Lewis

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Wyndham Lewis
Age: 72 †
Born: 1884
Born: November 18
Died: 1957
Died: January 1
Critic
Drawer
Editor
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Painter
Poet
Writer
Amherst
Nova Scotia
Percy Wyndham Lewis
Percy William Lewis
Percy Lewis
Wyndham Percy Lewis
Sharks
Cannibal
None
Contemptible
Called
Elephants
Crocodiles
Rather
Lion
Shark
Running
Lions
Caged
Ill
Rogues
Sardonic
Particularly
Zoos
Crocodile
Remain
Elephant
Rogue
Worse

More quotes by Wyndham Lewis

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Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.
Wyndham Lewis
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Then down came the lid--the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a war to end war. But it merely ended art. It did not end war.
Wyndham Lewis
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The Future is distant, like the Past, and therefore sentimental. The mere element Past must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind, is sentimental.
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Spain is an overflow of sombreness . . . a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.
Wyndham Lewis
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The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.
Wyndham Lewis
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The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.
Wyndham Lewis
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If the world would only build temples to Machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honored, pursue their trade without further trouble.
Wyndham Lewis
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Many great writers address audiences who do not exist to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage - that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.
Wyndham Lewis
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Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.
Wyndham Lewis
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In a period of such obsessing political controversy as the present, I believe that I am that strange animal, the individual without any politics at all.
Wyndham Lewis
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I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.
Wyndham Lewis
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In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.
Wyndham Lewis
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Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
Wyndham Lewis
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Sex is of the same clay as Time! -- of the same clay Since both are in their essence but One-Way Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart And subtle biological counterpart.
Wyndham Lewis
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The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit.
Wyndham Lewis
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The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable role with the promise of rewards -- material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden.
Wyndham Lewis
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Where there is abundance you can afford waste.
Wyndham Lewis
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I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
Wyndham Lewis
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Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
Wyndham Lewis
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Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!
Wyndham Lewis