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We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a great age that has not come off. We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.

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
First
Pace
Great
Belong
Men
Quickly
World
Moved
Age
Future
Firsts
Materialized
Come
Sharp

More quotes by 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.
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Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
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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.
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Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.
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Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.
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Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.
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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.
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The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.
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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.
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People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.
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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.
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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.
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All orthodox opinion - that is, today, revolutionary opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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