Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from…

“It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded…

— John Cowper Powys

“though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits!…

— 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

“Life is short and the number of books is appalling.”

— 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,…

— 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…

— 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…

— John Cowper Powys

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…

— 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

The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice.

— 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…

— John Cowper Powys

“There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the…

— 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

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

— 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…

— John Cowper Powys