Ezra Pound Quotes
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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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 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 worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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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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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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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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Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
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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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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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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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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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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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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
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Either move or be moved.
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What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
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Presentation, not reference.
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Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
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If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
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I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.