John Cowper Powys Quotes

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

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

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

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