“For to what end is our experience of life if deprived of a fitting esthetic revelation in our faces?” Imagining the ageing face as a meaningful record of lived experience · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919 Beauty Memory Time
“Different systems of beauty culture have compromised our inherent right not only to be ourselves but to look like ourselves.” Defending individuality against standardised ideals of appearance · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919 Beauty Truth
“Day by day the new interests and activities of modern life are prolonging the youth of our souls.” Suggesting that intellectual vitality can preserve a sense of inward youth · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919 Beauty Hope Time
“The adolescent has facial contours in harmony with the condition of his soul.” Expressing Loy's belief that the face should visibly correspond to inner life · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919 Beauty Truth
“The face is our most potent symbol of personality.” Connecting physical appearance with the outward expression of identity · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919 Beauty Truth
“Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.” Linking poetic rhythm directly to the character of the individual imagination · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925 Art Music Poetry
“The structure of all poetry is the movement that an active individuality makes in expressing itself.” Defining poetic form as the trace of an individual mind in motion · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925 Art Poetry
“All reading is the evocation of speech; the difference in our approach, then, in reading a poem or a newspaper is that our attitude in reading a poem must be rather that of listening to and looking at a pictured song.” Describing poetry as simultaneously visual, verbal and musical · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925 Art Music Poetry
“More than to read poetry we must listen to poetry.” Emphasising the essential role of sound in experiencing verse · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925 Music Poetry
“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.” Loy's celebrated definition joins language, image, music and thought · Essay, Modern Poetry, 1925 Art Music Poetry
“There is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it—” Rejecting inherited moral shame surrounding sexuality · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Love Truth
“Woman must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved—” A characteristically severe demand for independence from external validation · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Love Truth
“The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman depends entirely on chance.” Contrasting the social standards by which men and women were valued in her era · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Truth
“To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first & greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your virtue.” Attacking the social construction of female virtue as a means of control · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Truth
“The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.” A deliberately provocative statement exposing what Loy saw as antagonistic gender relations · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Love Truth
“Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are.” An enduring appeal for self-definition rather than identity through comparison · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Solitude Truth
“Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades & uniform education—you are glossing over Reality.” Arguing that institutional reforms alone cannot resolve deeper inequalities · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Truth
“There is no half-measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition.” Using deliberately extreme manifesto rhetoric to demand fundamental social change · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Truth
“Women if you want to realize yourselves—you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval—all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go.” Calling for profound psychological liberation from inherited assumptions · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Hope Truth
“The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate.” Opening her manifesto with an uncompromising critique of contemporary feminism · Feminist Manifesto, 1914 Truth
“Man is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.” Treating passivity of thought as a primary obstacle to freedom · Aphorisms on Futurism, 1914 Hope Truth
“Cease to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.” Advocating an identity formed from within rather than borrowed opinions · Aphorisms on Futurism, 1914 Solitude Truth
“Unscrew your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole.” Urging an intensified openness to the fullness of experience · Aphorisms on Futurism, 1914 Hope Truth
“Let the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.” Envisioning consciousness as expansively receptive and creatively transformative · Aphorisms on Futurism, 1914 Art Nature Truth
