Quote

Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.

Wyndham Lewis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Consciously
Hearing
Tragedy
Laughter
Seeing
Self
Smelling
Climax

More quotes by Wyndham Lewis

Image
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
Spain is an overflow of sombreness . . . a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
All orthodox opinion - that is, today, revolutionary opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
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
Image
A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To give up another person's love is a mild suicide like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?
Wyndham Lewis
Image
Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
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
Image
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.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
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
Image
Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
Wyndham Lewis
Image
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
Image
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