"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 Copy Share Image
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… — John Cowper Powys Copy Share Image
“It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a… — John Cowper Powys Copy Share
“though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! in books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. it is for this reason that a a bookshop -- especially a second-hand bookshop / antiquarian - is an arsenal of explosives,… — John Cowper Powys Copy Share
Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected. — John Cowper Powys Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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… — John Cowper Powys Copy Share
The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism. — John Cowper Powys Copy Share Image
The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice. — John Cowper Powys Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the soul of the great blazing sun there were complicated superhuman vibrations [connected] ... with the feelings of a few intellectual sages who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it… — John Cowper Powys Copy Share
