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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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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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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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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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We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
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Literature is news that stays news.
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Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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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.
Ezra Pound
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The artist is always beginning.
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Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound
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Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
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Either move or be moved.
Ezra Pound
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Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound
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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
Ezra Pound
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No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.
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What counts is the cultural level
Ezra Pound
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It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
Ezra Pound