Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
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Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.
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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 thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
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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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See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.
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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 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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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 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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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
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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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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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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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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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Presentation, not reference.
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Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
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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 sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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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.