Ezra Pound Quotes
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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 artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
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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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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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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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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
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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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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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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 temple is holy because it is not for sale.
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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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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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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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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And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness
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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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Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom.
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Presentation, not reference.
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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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It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
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Rhythm must have meaning.
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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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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.