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If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.

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
Instance
Avoid
Detestable
Function
Sensibility
Figures
Represent
Art
Showing
Much
Extent
People
Manners
Absurd

More quotes by 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.
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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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As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.
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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A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colors would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.
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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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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A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphereThe 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. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.
Wyndham Lewis
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Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.
Wyndham Lewis
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People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.
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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No American worth his salt should go looking around for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.
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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When we say 'science' we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.
Wyndham Lewis
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Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
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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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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Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
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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If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman's industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.
Wyndham Lewis