Top 35 John Cowper Powys Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.”

— John Cowper Powys

2. “No refining of one’s taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one’s powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one’s sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person’s true education.”

— John Cowper Powys

3. “Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles.”

— John Cowper Powys

4. “One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”

— John Cowper Powys

5. “The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.”

— John Cowper Powys

6. “Man is the animal who weeps and laughs – and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back – in a book.”

— John Cowper Powys

7. “Wolf’s wits, moving now, in spite of the fumes of smoke and alcohol, with restored clarity, achieved a momentous orientation of many obscure matters.”

— John Cowper Powys

8. “The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.”

— John Cowper Powys

9. “A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.”

— John Cowper Powys

10. “Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.”

— John Cowper Powys

11. “We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us!”

— John Cowper Powys

12. “Life is short and the number of books is appalling.”

— John Cowper Powys

13. “Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.”

— John Cowper Powys

14. “This killing of his ‘mythology’ how could he survive it? His ‘mythology’ had been his escape from life, his escape into a world where machinery could not reach him, his escape into a deep, green, lovely world where thoughts unfolded themselves like large, beautiful leaves growing out of fathoms of blue-green water!”

— John Cowper Powys

15. “He remembered to the end of his life what he felt at that moment, while the bone of his lower jaw met the bones of his knuckles pressed so hard against them. He felt absolutely alone – alone in an emptiness that was different from empty space. He did not pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself and waited – waited till whatever it was that enclosed him made some sign.”

— John Cowper Powys

16. “We’ll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!”

— John Cowper Powys

17. “If by the time we’re sixty we haven’t learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven’t grown old to much purpose.”

— John Cowper Powys

18. “Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody’s life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question.”

— John Cowper Powys

19. “Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.”

— John Cowper Powys

20. “The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice.”

— John Cowper Powys

21. “Who has not watched a mother stroke her child’s cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?”

— John Cowper Powys

22. “To a real child anything will serve as a toy.”

— John Cowper Powys

23. “It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”

— John Cowper Powys

24. “Words cannot be remote from reality when they create reality.”

— John Cowper Powys

25. “Below the surface of the most civilised human beings, the hunger-lust darts and snaps like a fish, snatches and rends like a bird, growls like a wolf, snarls like a panther, buzzes like a hornet, bleats like a sheep and stamps like a bull; and there is nothing so aggravating to hungry stomachs as the sight of dirty plates pushed away from satisfied rival stomachs.”

— John Cowper Powys

26. “Life seemed entirely composed of weeping faces, old men sneaking up bedroom-stairs, tombstones with spittle trickling down, and black-edged calling-cards. He felt as if the First Cause of the Universe were a small, malignant grub, radiating a deadly blight in withering, centrifugal air-waves!”

— John Cowper Powys

27. “If only – so he thought to himself later – Gerda’s face had been a little less flawless in its beauty, the beauty of her body would have remained as maddening to his senses as it was at the beginning. But the more he had seen of her the more beautiful her face had grown; until it had now reached that magical level of loveliness which absorbs with a kind of absoluteness the whole aesthetic sense, paralysing the erotic sensibility.”

— John Cowper Powys

28. “The influence of friendship upon culture differs from that of love, in that it assumes the basic idiosyncrasies of personal taste to be unalterable. Love, in spite of all rational knowledge to the contrary, is always in the mood of believing in miracles.”

— John Cowper Powys

29. “The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature’s ways.”

— John Cowper Powys

30. “Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy.”

— John Cowper Powys

31. “Nothing is against nature!” he retorted. “That’s the mistake people make; and it causes endless unhappiness.”

— John Cowper Powys

32. “Reason? Justice? The forces that victimized and paralysed him now were those that had created the world. Who was he to contend against them?”

— John Cowper Powys

33. “And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature.”

— John Cowper Powys

34. “It was characteristic of the vein of unhappy sluggishness and inertness in him that only when impressions had subsided into the remote past could he be thrilled by them. The reality of the present seemed always weighted with something hurting.”

— John Cowper Powys

35. “Children’s aesthetic sense is a deep half-animal feeling and when it is outraged it leaves a wound behind it that never quite heals up.”

— John Cowper Powys

36. “The day was warm; but the fact that the sky was covered with a filmy veil of grey clouds gave to the vast plain before him the appearance of a landscape whose dominant characteristic consisted in a patient effacement of all emphatic or outstanding qualities. The green of the meadows was a shy, watery green. The verdure of the elm trees was a sombre, blackish monotony. The yellow of the stubble land was a whitish-yellow, pallid and lustreless.”

— John Cowper Powys

37. “Instead of pausing in our multifarious activities, instead of putting aside our laborious quests, we are being perpetually fooled into thinking that happiness is to be reached in the same way as pleasure is, by the possession of something.”

— John Cowper Powys