Ezra Pound Quotes
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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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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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
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Every great change is simple.
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I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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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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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
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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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The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
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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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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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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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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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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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Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
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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.