It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
Ezra PoundRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our understanding of the past is shaped by our present experiences rather than a linear timeline.
Ezra Pound's quote suggests that our perception of history is not merely a straightforward chronology of events, but rather a complex interplay of memories, emotions, and interpretations that resonate from our current existence. This perspective highlights how individual experiences influence the way we comprehend and relate to historical events, emphasizing that our connection to the past is enriched by the ripples of our present rather than a sterile timeline of dates.
Themes
HistoryMemoryPerceptionExperiencePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about how personal trauma shapes our understanding of historical events.
More from Ezra Pound
All quotes →The 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
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.
Franz KafkaRead
Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens.... My grandfather would say we're part of something incredibly wonderful - more marvelous than we imagine. My grandfather would say we ought to go out and look at it once in a while so we don't lose our place in it.
Robert FulghumRead
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.
W. H. AudenRead
If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.
Cesare BeccariaRead
Reason wishes that the judgement it gives be just; anger wishes that the judgement it has given seem to be just.
Seneca The YoungerRead
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
Pierre-Joseph ProudhonRead