Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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Rhythm must have meaning.
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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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It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
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Either move or be moved.
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The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
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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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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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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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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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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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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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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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Artists are the antennae of the race.
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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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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
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Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
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It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
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Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.