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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 natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Ezra Pound
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USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
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As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound
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Liberty is not a right but a duty.
Ezra Pound
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Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence
Ezra Pound
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The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
Ezra Pound
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To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
Ezra Pound
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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.
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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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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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.
Ezra Pound
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Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
Ezra Pound
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I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
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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In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.
Ezra Pound
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
Ezra Pound
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
Ezra Pound
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound
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Rhythm must have meaning.
Ezra Pound
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I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
Ezra Pound