The Meaning of Culture Quotes

“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

“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 exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

“Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

“I will proceed to point out — and not blindly or simply at random — the sort of objects, that, without reluctance, most men and women would agree to call by this name. As I enumerate things of this kind, the reader will, I believe, find little to quarrel with in my feeling that they have something — though it is not easy to say what — in common between them all. But whatever this evasive essence of the poetical element may be, it is from this, from this floating and fluctuating quality, shared by so many things, that the written art of poetry draws its selected material.
Loaves of bread . . . honey in the honeycomb . . . summer hay-stacks and spring withy-beds . . . the flames of candles . . . the flight of birds . . . the darting of shoals of fish . . . the shadows of clouds . . . the rising and sinking of the sun . . . old buildings, old rituals, old mythologies . . . the annual procession of the seasons . . . weeds and shells at the ocean’s edge, wet pebbles and the thin black windrow . . . rain on roofs . . . thunder on horizons . . . murmuring of brooks, sweetness of grass . . . sadness of stirred leaves . . . the deep symbolic meaning of such objects as a plough, a sword, a grindstone, a windmill, a boat, a cradle, a coffin . . . the friendliness of wind-tossed smoke, arising from hearth or chimney . . . the forlornness of swaying reed-tops above lonely saltmarshes . . . the warmth of sun-scented leaf-mould, the udders of cattle, the horns of goats, the spouting of whales . . . frost marks in ditch-mud . . . vapour-circles round misty moons . . . rivers and highways that carry old legends, old memories, old tragic transactions into the unborn future — all these things, and the emanations proceeding from these things, possess some mysterious quality in common; and it would seem that this quality cannot be named by any other name than that of the poetical element in life.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

“Any manifestation of beauty may be completely unsympathetic to traditional emotion, feeling, sentiment; whereas it is of the very essence of poetry to remain saturated with all the historic human reactions, with every sort of old-world sentiment. Poetry is in fact a thing so totally different, in both its substance and its entelechy, from beauty that the two revelations appeal to different types of mind. We must remember that an object can be beautiful without being in the least poetical; just as it can be poetical without being in the least beautiful.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture