Ezra Pound Quotes
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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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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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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I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
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To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
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Rhythm must have meaning.
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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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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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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
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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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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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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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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
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Presentation, not reference.
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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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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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If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
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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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America is a lunatic asylum.
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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.