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Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound Quotes

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Famous Ezra Pound Quotes

“My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.”

IfsFeelsDoeHas BeensStillsDifferentMatterDoneFeelingsAgeCertainEmotionStruggleThousandIntellectualRemainsShipsPlentyNuanceDuration
Author:Ezra Pound
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“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”

IfsGivingMindHumansSpeakSoundEmotionMagicFiguresMathematicsInspiredMysteriousAbstractPoetry IsSpellsSquaresEquationsHuman EmotionsInclineTrianglesArcane
Author:Ezra Pound
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“Song in the Manner of Housman" O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera.... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera.”

PeopleIfsHumansLittlesSongDiesBornSpaceGraceTreeBirdShotsLondonHungWoeLadMorbidEtcetera
Author:Ezra Pound
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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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Author:Ezra Pound
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“We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.”

IfsNeedsBookHandsCareAgePainNeededGardenAbundanceCopiesReverencePersistMuseConservation
Book:ABC of Reading
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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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Book:Pavannes and Divagations
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