Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by John Cowper Powys, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring John Cowper Powys quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 27 John Cowper Powys quotes for you to read and share.
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
What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world? -- John Cowper Powys
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
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
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
Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace. -- John Cowper Powys
This is the whole secret of the practice of Elementalism: it obtains happiness by the most rigid and austere simplification of the means to happiness. -- John Cowper Powys
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
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
The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways. -- John Cowper Powys
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
Words cannot be remote from reality when they create reality. -- John Cowper Powys
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
We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us! -- John Cowper Powys
One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth. -- John Cowper Powys
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
The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism. -- John Cowper Powys
Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles. -- John Cowper Powys
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
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
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
Life is short and the number of books is appalling. -- John Cowper Powys
Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected. -- John Cowper Powys
We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble! -- John Cowper Powys
To a real child anything will serve as a toy. -- John Cowper Powys
It is by a process of simplification carried constantly further and further that happiness is won. -- John Cowper Powys
The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice. -- John Cowper Powys