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.
EZRA POUNDSeems 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.
More Ezra Pound Quotes
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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
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Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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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.
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Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
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Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers.
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There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
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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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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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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
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And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.
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Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism, the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.
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If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
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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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The artist is always beginning.
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Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on to him.
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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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The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
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Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
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I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron, I should have been able to do better.
EZRA POUND