Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Wyndham Lewis (British Artist, Writer)

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957,) fully Percy Wyndham Lewis, was an English novelist, painter, and critic. He founded the Vorticist movement, which sought to relate art and literature to the industrial process.

Born on a yacht off Amehurst, Nova Scotia, Lewis was educated at the Slade School of Art, London. He left three years later without completing his course. Instead, he went to Paris, where he practiced painting, attended lectures at the Sorbonne, and became interested in Cubist and Expressionist art. With Ezra Pound, he instituted the Vorticist movement and founded Blast (1914–15,) the magazine which expounded their theories.

From 1916–18, Lewis served on the Western Front during World War I as a bombardier, then as a war artist. In the early 1930s, his right-wing sympathies were out of fashion. He immigrated to Canada at the beginning of World War II, returning to London in 1945. In 1951, he went blind.

Lewis’s novels, Tarr (1918,) The Childermass (1928,) and The Apes of God (1930) are influential, vivid satires. Other notable novels are The Revenge for Love (1937) and Self Condemned (1954,) which are partly autobiographical. The Human Age (1955,) a trilogy conceived with The Childermass and continued with Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955,) was modeled on Dante and Milton.

Lewis also wrote political and critical essays, short stories, and the autobiographies Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950.) As a writer, he has been ranked by some critics alongside James Joyce. As a painter, he was one of the foremost experimentalists of his time in British art. He was a highly skilled portraitist, painting, among others, Ezra Pound, Edith Sitwell, and T. S. Eliot.

American biographer Jeffrey Meyers wrote The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (1980.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Wyndham Lewis

All orthodox opinion—that is, today, “revolutionary” opinion either of the pure or the impure variety—is anti-man.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Religion

As a result of the feminist revolution, “feminine” becomes an abusive epithet.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Women, Feminism

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
Topics: Principles

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
Topics: Men

Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman … as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Feminism, Women

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
Topics: Advertising

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
Topics: Science

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
Topics: Men

It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Manners

The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of decency. The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Science

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. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Ideas

In the democratic western countries, so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of “freedom,” like a bastard brother of reform.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Capitalism

A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals

With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Family

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
Topics: Economics

Then we are assured by Sartre that owing to the final disappearance of God our liberty is absolute! At this the entire audience waves its hat or claps its hands. But this natural enthusiasm is turned abruptly into something much less buoyant when it is learnt that this liberty weighs us down immediately with tremendous responsibilities. We now have to take all God’s worries on our shoulders—now that we are become men like gods. It is at this point that the Anxiety and Despondency begin, ending in utter despair.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Liberty

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
Topics: Revolution

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
Topics: Laziness

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

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
Topics: Equality

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
Topics: America

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
Topics: America

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutions

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
Topics: Youth

Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.
Wyndham Lewis
Topics: Art

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
Topics: Politics

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