Ezra Pound Quotes
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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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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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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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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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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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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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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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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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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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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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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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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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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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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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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It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
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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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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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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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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
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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.