Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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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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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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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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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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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 temple is holy because it is not for sale.
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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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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
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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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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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I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
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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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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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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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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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I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
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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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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
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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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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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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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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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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.