The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.

- John Cowper Powys

The influence of friendship upon culture differs from that of love, in that it assumes the basic idiosyncrasies of personal taste to be unalterable. …

- John Cowper Powys

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…

- John Cowper Powys

What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judge…

- John Cowper Powys

Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles.

- John Cowper Powys

The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. … The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a sp…

- John Cowper Powys

If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled …

- John Cowper Powys

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

- John Cowper Powys

To a real child anything will serve as a toy.

- John Cowper Powys