Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound turns indecision into a kind of aesthetic problem: if the options are truly “evenly balanced,” then rational calculation has hit its limit, and what’s left is temperament. “Choose the bolder” isn’t just advice about courage; it’s a theory of artistic value smuggled in as practical counsel. Boldness becomes a tiebreaker because it’s the only variable that can’t be measured in advance. You can’t spreadsheet your way into a leap.

The line works because it flatters and challenges at once. It reassures you that hesitation isn’t necessarily ignorance; it can be the sign of real parity. Then it shames the reader out of safety, implying that the timid choice is a kind of self-betrayal. Pound’s diction is brisk, almost managerial (“courses of action”), but the payoff is romantic: risk as authenticity.

Context matters. Pound the poet is also Pound the modernist impresario, the man urging literature to “Make it new” and throwing his weight behind sharper, more radical forms. In that cultural moment, boldness wasn’t a lifestyle slogan; it was an avant-garde ethic, a wager that the future belongs to whoever breaks the old machinery first. The subtext: when tradition and innovation feel equally plausible, pick the move that creates a new standard rather than protects an old one.

There’s an irony, too, given Pound’s political catastrophes: boldness can be visionary, or it can be ruinous. The quote’s seduction is its clean certainty; its danger is how easily “bolder” becomes “better” without asking better for whom, and at what cost.