Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Society is a defensive organization against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose, to rout its pretensions, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a new effort, which it is determined not to make.

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. “The architectural simplicity” – whether of a platonic idea or greek temple – I far prefer to no idea at all, or no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE – even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome – that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. Bergson is the enemy of the Eye, from the start; though he might arrive at some emotional compromise with the Ear. But I can hardly imagine any way in which he is not against every form of intelligent life. (p. 338)

The novelty of any time enables people to pretend that they are existing in the state of society that in fact they have superseded. (It is an old political expedient to pretend to be what you have destroyed.) They will pretend that their abuses are old abuses and that only their reforms are new.

It could perhaps be asserted, even, that the greatest Satire cannot be moralistic at all: if for no other reason, because no mind of the first order has ever itself been taken in, nor consented to take in others, by the crude injunctions of any purely moral code.

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

Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire. An ideal formula of ironic, gently "satiric", self-expression was provided by that master for the undergraduate underworld, tired and thirsty for poetic fame in a small way. The results of Mr Eliot are not Mr Eliot himself: but satire with him has been the painted smile of the clown. Habits of expression ensuing from mannerism are, as a fact, remote from the central function of satire. In its essence the purpose of satire — whether verse or prose — is aggression. (When whimsical, sentimental, or "poetic" it is a sort of bastard humour.) 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.

Wherever there is objective truth there is satire.

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.

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.

That is the sacrosanct period-of-periods — the Victorian death, the birth of ! Ah the pioneer naughtiness of the "Naughty Nineties", that 'Made the World Safe for Homosexuality!'

I am not in agreement with the current belief in a strained 'impersonality' as the secret of artistic success. Nor can I see the sense of pretending — as it must be a pretence, and a thin one, too — that in my account to you of what I have seen I can be impartial and omniscient. That would be in the nature of a bluff or a blasphemy. There can only be one judge and I am not he.<p>I am not a judge but a party. All I can claim is that my cause is not an idle one — that I appeal less to passion than to reason.

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.

Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions.

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.

Sex was really all bluff — power the thing.