Quote

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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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
People
Else
Advantage
Shouting
Many
Exist
Audiences
Sometimes
Groups
Apparently
Great
Nobody
Address
Always
Somebody
Addresses
Men
Seeing
Group
Think
Wisdom
Writers
Addressed
Thinking
Audience
Sight
Passionately

More quotes by Wyndham Lewis

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Art is the expression of an enormous preference.
Wyndham Lewis
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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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An artist should be as impartial as God.
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.
Wyndham Lewis
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Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding.... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.
Wyndham Lewis
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A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them.
Wyndham Lewis
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Lewis sought no disciples, nor does he offer a program or solution, rather his contribution is a critical discipline. Lewis is a stimulant, a mode of perception, rather than a position or practice.
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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Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman, as a respecter of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.
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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There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man - if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on.
Wyndham Lewis
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Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.
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
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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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Life is art's rival and vice versa.
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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For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
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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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 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