105 Quotes by John Cowper Powys

One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.

Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.

Man is the animal who weeps and laughs – and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back – in a book.

The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.

Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

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!

Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.