Ezra Pound Quotes
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Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
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The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
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The natural object is always the adequate symbol.
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Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.
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There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.
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I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it; I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral, Seeing that long standing increases all things regardless of quality.
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Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
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Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.
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That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.
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Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
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Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later . . . some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.
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The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.
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I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
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All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
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Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
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As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
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A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.
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My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.
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Install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
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No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
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All great art is born of the metropolis.
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.