107 Quotes by Wyndham Lewis

In a period of such obsessing political controversy as the present, I believe that I am that strange animal, the individual without any politics at all.

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.

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.

An artist should be as impartial as God.

In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise; and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.

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.

People ought to be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose. I even disapprove of propping them up. Let nations, like men, die in peace. I rather feel as if I had been delivering pep talks to men dying of cancer.

We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a “great age” that has not “come off”. We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.

The Future is distant, like the Past, and therefore sentimental. The mere element “Past” must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind, is sentimental.