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 POUNDUse no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
More Ezra Pound Quotes
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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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.
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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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A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
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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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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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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
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Genius, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
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I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
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A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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