Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
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It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.
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In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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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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A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
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The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
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A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
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The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
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Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
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If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
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Presentation, not reference.