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The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Ezra Pound

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Ezra Pound
Age: 87 †
Born: 1885
Born: October 30
Died: 1972
Died: November 1
Autobiographer
Composer
Economist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Radio Personality
Translator
Writer
Hailey
Idaho
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound
Failures
Mediocrity
Historical
History
Art

More quotes by Ezra Pound

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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.
Ezra Pound
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Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
Ezra Pound
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
Ezra Pound
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What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.
Ezra Pound
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Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
Ezra Pound
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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
Ezra Pound
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
Ezra Pound
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Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound
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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
Ezra Pound
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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!
Ezra Pound
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Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
Ezra Pound
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Glance is the enemy of vision.
Ezra Pound
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A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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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
Ezra Pound