Ezra Pound Quotes
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People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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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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The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
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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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The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
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Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
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The only history that matters is the history we know.
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You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.
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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
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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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One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
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It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
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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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USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
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A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
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Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.
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The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
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There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
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Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.