Top 60 Wyndham Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.”

— Wyndham Lewis

2. “Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.”

— Wyndham Lewis

3. “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

4. “What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?”

— Wyndham Lewis

5. “Art is the expression of an enormous preference.”

— Wyndham Lewis

6. “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

7. “An artist should be as impartial as God.”

— Wyndham Lewis

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Wyndham Lewis

11. “Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.”

— Wyndham Lewis

12. “Life is art’s rival and vice versa.”

— Wyndham Lewis

13. “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

14. “Where there is abundance you can afford waste.”

— Wyndham Lewis

15. “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

16. “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

17. “To give up another person’s love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.”

— Wyndham Lewis

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Wyndham Lewis

20. “God is, of course, a terrifying reality. I had thought that I knew all about God, and had Him in a pigeon hole. But I met Him at the corner of a street – He entered my mind with a bang, and nearly burst my head open.”

— Wyndham Lewis

21. “Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.”

— Wyndham Lewis

22. “If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman’s industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.”

— Wyndham Lewis

23. “Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”

— Wyndham Lewis

24. “The 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.”

— Wyndham Lewis

25. “Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.”

— Wyndham Lewis

26. “No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.”

— Wyndham Lewis

27. “People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.”

— Wyndham Lewis

28. “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.”

— Wyndham Lewis

29. “Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.”

— Wyndham Lewis

30. “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

31. “Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.”

— Wyndham Lewis

32. “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

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

— Wyndham Lewis

34. “Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.”

— Wyndham Lewis

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite...”

— Wyndham Lewis

39. “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

40. “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

41. “People ought to be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose. I even disapprove of propping them up. Let nations, like men, die in peace. I rather feel as if I had been delivering pep talks to men dying of cancer.”

— Wyndham Lewis

42. “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

43. “All orthodox opinion – that is, today, “revolutionary” opinion either of the pure or the impure variety – is anti-man.”

— Wyndham Lewis

44. “Laughter is the Wild Body’s song of triumph.”

— Wyndham Lewis

45. “As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.”

— Wyndham Lewis

46. “For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.”

— Wyndham Lewis

47. “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

48. “Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.”

— Wyndham Lewis

49. “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

50. “One night Death left his card. I was not familiar with the name he chose: but the black edge was deep. I flung it back. A thousand awakenings of violence.”

— Wyndham Lewis