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

More quotes by Wyndham Lewis

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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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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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Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
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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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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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
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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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In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.
Wyndham Lewis
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Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
Wyndham Lewis
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The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.
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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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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Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
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.
Wyndham Lewis
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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.
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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Spain is an overflow of sombreness . . . a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.
Wyndham Lewis
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Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
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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As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.
Wyndham Lewis