"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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Ezra Pound quotes (page 6 of 11)
216 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns."
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"The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts."
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"If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point."
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"I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown."
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"A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."
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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."
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"Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."
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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."
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"Glance is the enemy of vision."
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"When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish."
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"Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity."
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"The natural object is always the adequate symbol."
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"There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent."
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"The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting."
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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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"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."
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"Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art."
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"Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols."
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"Utter originality is, of course, out of the question."
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