Ezra Pound Quotes
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Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
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Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
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A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.
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No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.
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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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From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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Where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.
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Install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
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Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
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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 Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.
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This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
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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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My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.
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With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
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The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it.
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I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.
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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
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As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
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Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
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The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.