Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Wyndham Lewis delivers sardonic takes on art, media, and modern life.

27 quotes

1. 1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph. 2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously. 3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind. 4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion. 5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away. 6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight. 7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy. 8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies. 9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist. 10. Laughter is the mind sneezing. 11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic. 12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.

5. The puritanic 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. There's Wyndham Lewis fuming out of sight, That lonely old volcano of the Right.

9. A buffalo in wolf's clothing.

10. 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.

11. Prostration is our natural position. A wormlike movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.

12. Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.

13. All orthodox opinion - that is, today, "revolutionary" opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man.

14. With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man.

15. Spain is an overflow of sombreness . . . a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.

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

17. 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.

18. 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.

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

20. 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.

21. 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!

22. 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?

23. 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.

24. Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. Life is art's rival and vice versa.