John Cowper Powys famous quotes

04-21-2025

One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Spiritual #Needs #Earth
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
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
The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. â€¦ 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
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
The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Money #People #Giving
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 strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Psychics #Desire #World
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 #Pathetic
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
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
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
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" 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 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
Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Wise #Pain #Animal
Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Love #Believe #Miracle
To read great books does not mean one becomes â€˜bookishâ€™; 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
Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Mind #May #Forget
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
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
Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Ambition #Enemy
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 love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Way #Aliens #Interfere
To a real child anything will serve as a toy.
-- John Cowper Powys

#Children #Real #Toys
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

#Spiritual #Mother #People

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