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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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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
Good
Pope
Shakespeare
Comic
Delight
Compassion
Events
Satirist
Needed
Venom
Sense
Expansion

More quotes by 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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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.
Wyndham Lewis
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Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.
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
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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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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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The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
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 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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Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weakness of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?
Wyndham Lewis
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Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!
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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Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
Wyndham Lewis
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Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.
Wyndham Lewis
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What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice -- the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero.
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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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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An artist should be as impartial as God.
Wyndham Lewis
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Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.
Wyndham Lewis
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Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.
Wyndham Lewis