Ezra Pound Quotes
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And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.
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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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Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
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Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
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The only history that matters is the history we know.
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I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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The real trouble with war modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
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With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
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Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence.
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The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.
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A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
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I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.
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I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
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Quiet this metal! Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire. Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate. Let them draw together the bones of the metal.
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Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
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What counts is the cultural level.
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Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.