John Cowper Powys Quotes

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

Their wet cold faces, her shapeless nose and his grotesque hooked nose like the caricature-mask of a Roman soldier, their large, contorted, abnormal mouths, made, it might seem, more for anguished curses against God than for the sweet usage of lovers, were now pressed savagely against each other and, as they kissed, queer sounds came from both their throats, that were answered by the groanings of the tree and by the raindrops as the wind shook it.

O I do so agree with you in Faith being the thing! But Henry (my dear) I can't I can't I can't and I won't (even if it is the old devil himself in me!) I can't agree with you about 'Love'. No no no no no no no no no no I am sick of love. It has been tried and it has failed. Jesus & Love have had their day.

"Nothing is against nature!" he retorted. "That's the mistake people make; and it causes endless unhappiness."

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.

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.

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.

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!

To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.

This is the whole secret of the practice of Elementalism: it obtains happiness by the most rigid and austere simplification of the means to happiness.

Here under St. Michael's Tower sat these three figures, the lean shabby-genteel John, the hulking weather-bleached Sam, the black-coated Mr. Evans — all atheists towards the life-giving Sun-God, and all expanding now, in their thoughts, their feelings, their secretest hopes, because of the victory of vapour over light and of dampness over heat!

She [Mother Legge] was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a woman, with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim at not seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted to see.

...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.

My answer to the question "Why do we philosophize?" is as follows. We philosophize for the same reason that we move and speak and laugh and eat and love. In other words, we philosophize because man is a philosophical animal.… We may be as sceptical as we please. Our very scepticism is the confession of an implicit philosophy.

Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.