6 Quotes & Sayings By John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys, OM, was an English writer. He was also a poet, novelist, essayist, biographer and critic. He was born in Clifton Hampden, near Bristol. After being educated at Malvern College he went to Balliol College, Oxford University where he began to write poetry Read more

He next gained employment as the editor of a small provincial newspaper in North Devonshire. There he wrote a novel, The Father and Son, which was published in 1908 and made a great impression on his contemporaries. In 1909 he became lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham.

In 1911 he married Elspeth Thomson and the couple moved to Cornwall where Powys began writing novels and poems that reflected his love of that area of England. In 1913 Powys moved with his family to a farmhouse near Glastonbury where he began experimenting with different types of organic farming. This experimentation with organic farming continued during the Second World War when Powys designed a crop rotation system for his garden in order to minimize the effect on the soil of wartime bombing.

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The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind. John Cowper Powys
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Reason? Justice? The forces that victimized and paralysed him now were those that had created the world. Who was he to contend against them? John Cowper Powys
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Back therefore we find ourselves returning. Back to the wisdom of the plough; back to the wisdom of those who follow the sea. It is all a matter of the wheel coming full-circle. For the sophisticated system of mental reactions to which we finally give our adherence is only the intellectualised reproduction of what more happily constituted natures, without knowing what they possess, possess. Thus between true philosophers and the true simple people there is a magnetic understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralysed on the prongs of their own conceit". John Cowper Powys
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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
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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