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Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.

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
Art
Sadism
Harshness
Sadistic
Roughly
Reaches
Attempts
Excess
Reach
Fineness

More quotes by 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 streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.
Wyndham Lewis
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But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.
Wyndham Lewis
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Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
Wyndham Lewis
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Art is the expression of an enormous preference.
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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God is, of course, a terrifying reality. I had thought that I knew all about God, and had Him in a pigeon hole. But I met Him at the corner of a street -- He entered my mind with a bang, and nearly burst my head open.
Wyndham Lewis
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The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.
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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So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor.
Wyndham Lewis
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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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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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Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?
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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(Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.
Wyndham Lewis
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Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.
Wyndham Lewis
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To be a satirist, at all events. The venom of Pope is what is needed. The sense of delight -- the expansion and the compassion of Shakespeare is no good at all for that. He is a bad comic.
Wyndham Lewis
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To give up another person's love is a mild suicide like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.
Wyndham Lewis
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The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.
Wyndham Lewis