The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
EZRA POUNDThe history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
More Ezra Pound Quotes
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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.
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The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
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A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
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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.
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I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
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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.
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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.
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
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Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
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A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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Either move or be moved.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding in breeding, No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.
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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 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.
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No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.
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It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.
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No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a ‘country run by Jews,’
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