John Cowper Powys

"This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contes…"

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

"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 exultatio…"

"Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question."

"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 permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism."

"They are at least proof of the inalienable part played, in the functioning of our complex vision, by sensation as an organ of research. But they have a further interest. They are an illuminating revel…"

"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."