It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
Ezra PoundRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the tendency to believe that any action, even if misguided, is better than inaction.
Ezra Pound's quote critiques a common mindset where individuals and societies impulsively seek improvement through immediate actions, often without thoughtful consideration or planning. This behavior can stem from a fear of stagnation, leading to decisions driven by urgency rather than strategy, suggesting that sometimes taking no action is more prudent than jumping to conclusions or acting rashly.
Themes
ActionInactionImprovementDecision MakingPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
During a team meeting discussing ongoing projects, one could use this quote to point out the dangers of rushing decisions without proper analysis.
More from Ezra Pound
All quotes βThe ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
Ezra PoundRead
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
Ezra PoundRead
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 PoundRead
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Ezra PoundRead
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.
Ezra PoundRead
Similar quotes
Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.
Jose MartiRead
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
Richard DawkinsRead
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
Abraham LincolnRead
Chinese martial artists consider themselves to be gardeners, and it's an honor for them to take care of this garden, to better it and hand it over to the generations that follow. I think that's a very important message in a time when personal achievement seems to be the only criteria of success.
Wong Kar-WaiRead
Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.
J. K. RowlingRead
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Aldous HuxleyRead