John Cowper Powys Quotes

• One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

  John Cowper Powys

  Spiritual, Needs, Earth

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys (p. 178), 1929.

  50 Copy quote

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

  John Cowper Powys

  Islands, Opiates, Poison

  John Cowper Powys (1938). “Enjoyment of Literature”, New York, Simon

  28 Copy quote

• Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

  John Cowper Powys

  Worry, Genius, Littles

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 134, 1929.

  24 Copy quote

• If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven't grown old to much purpose.

  John Cowper Powys

  Purpose, Action, Compromise

  John Cowper Powys (1944). “The art of growing old”

  26 Copy quote

• What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judged by the number of diseases from which he escapes. The value of a man is in his human qualities: in his character, in his conscience, in the nobility and magnanimity, of his soul. Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience.

  John Cowper Powys

  Character, Animal, Men

  27 Copy quote

• The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. … The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry; and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.

  John Cowper Powys

  Spiritual, Mistake, Past

  19 Copy quote

• Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles.

  John Cowper Powys

  Love, Believe, Miracle

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cowper Powys

  Machines, Contemplation, Preacher

  John Cowper Powys (1930). “In defence of sensuality”

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cowper Powys

  Men, Creative, Overcoming

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys (p. 222), 1929.

  19 Copy quote

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

  John Cowper Powys

  Psychics, Desire, World

  14 Copy quote

• It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

  John Cowper Powys

  Mother, Spiritual, People

  5 Copy quote

• Words cannot be remote from reality when they create reality.

  John Cowper Powys

  Reality

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cowper Powys

  Book, Mean, People

  11 Copy quote

• Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.

  John Cowper Powys

  Ambition, Enemy

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, 1929.

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cowper Powys

  Art, Psychology, Literature

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 175, 1936.

  8 Copy quote

• To a real child anything will serve as a toy.

  John Cowper Powys

  Children, Real, Toys

  John Cowper Powys (2013). “Autobiography”, p.29, Faber & Faber

  15 Copy quote

• The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.

  John Cowper Powys

  Way, Aliens, Knows

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 209, 1929.

  11 Copy quote

• Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?

  John Cowper Powys

  Family, Mother, Children

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cowper Powys

  Book, Writing, Animal

  John Cowper Powys (1938). “Enjoyment of Literature”, New York, Simon

  7 Copy quote

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

  John Cowper Powys

  Attitude, Philosophy, Limitless

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, pp. 27-28, 1929.

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cowper Powys

  Believe, Miracle, Culture

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 170, 1929.

  9 Copy quote

• "The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

  John Cowper Powys

  Art, Book, Culture

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 134, 1929.

  10 Copy quote

• Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question.

  John Cowper Powys

  Scene, Persons, Disregarded

  "A Glastonbury Romance". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 849, March 6, 1932.

  7 Copy quote

• It is that cricket field that, in all the sharp and bitter moments of life as they come to me now, gives me a sense of wholesome proportion: 'At least I am not playing cricket!

  John Cowper Powys

  Giving, Fields, Bitter

  Quoted in Helen Exley Cricket Quotations (1992).

  5 Copy quote

• This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness.

  John Cowper Powys

  Moving, Life And Death, Darkness

  John Cowper Powys (1920). “The Complex Vision”

  7 Copy quote

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