John Cowper Powys Quotes

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.

Sexual gratitude is an emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediæval times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree.

If only he knew that there were a God, who for one second had an ear open, what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy, stupid orifice. In the old days their gods made them sacrifice their enemies to propitiate the great pain-engine.

Were all his better actions only so many Pharisaic sops thrown one by one into the mouth of a Cerberus of selfishness, monstrous and insane? Was

...we have a right to narrow down our universe ever further and further; until like the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey it is made up of certain simple endurances, enjoyments, mental and physical struggles, surrounded by the washing of the sea, the blowing of the wind, the swaying of the wheat, the falling of the rain, the voyaging of the clouds, and the motions of the sun and moon and dawn and twilight.

"What I've got...to say, Missus, be for Mr. Robinson's ear alone. Please allow me, Missus, for all that us poor folks have got left" — he stopped and threw a very sinister leer at Red — "be what be put in our minds by they as be book-larned and glib of tongue, like this clever Mister here, who is foreman of his Worship's. Us poor dogs hasn't got anything left in the world, us hasn't, except they nice, little thoughties, they pretty thoughties, what clever ones, like Mister here, do put into we."

Lilith was still playing her perpetual game; and it was revealed to Lady Lilt, and not wholly concealed even from our friend Spardo, that the present object of the girl's felonious wiles was none other than the saintly personage, armoured in the chastity of grey cloth, wrapped in the chastity of grey vapourings, fortified in the chastity of grey theocracy, cramped in the chastity of grey idealism, who was now approaching the entrance to Lost Towers between the door-post on the left and the profile of Tiberius Caesar on the right.

They are at least proof of the inalienable part played, in the functioning of our complex vision, by sensation as an organ of research. But they have a further interest. They are an illuminating revelation of the inherent character and personal bias of the individual soul who is philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the person projecting this particular image.

There are only two mortal sins in the world; one of these is to be cruel and the other is to possess, and they are both destructive of happiness.

In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that drowns, in its full-blossomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-human voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women.

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.

There was a general stir in the room and a craning forward of necks. The seasoned cronies of the Three Peewits had long ago discovered that the most delectable of all social delights was a quarrel that just stopped short of physical violence.

It is hard to be impersonal in a cosmos that runs to personality.

"It must have been after more than five minutes of this concentrated examination of the phenomenal shape which this strange growth on the horse's neck was gradually assuming, that the door-keeper suddenly leapt to his feet and began shouting: "Bundy! Bundy! Bundy! come quick! Here's a horse that's going to have two heads! For God's sake come quick, Bundy, and look! It's going to have a man's head as well as its own! Quick! Quick! Bundy! come quick!

Wolf Solent was able to indulge in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement.