black
grey
blue
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This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Ezra Pound

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
EZRA POUND

Ability Art Genius Himself Man Material Ordinary Perception Talent
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
EZRA POUND

Adjective Reveal Word
Seems 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.
EZRA POUND

Argument Avoid Clear Infiltrate Limitation Race Yourself
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
EZRA POUND

Day Hands Key Man Reading
Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
EZRA POUND

Fools One Liner Spontaneous
The what is so much more important than how.
EZRA POUND

Important Reason
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.
EZRA POUND

Attention Himself Page Popular Reading Secret Writing
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
EZRA POUND

Art Growth Humanity Tree Waste
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 POUND

Artist Craft Interest Live Modern Violence
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
EZRA POUND

Classic Definition Forever Fresh Rule Structure
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
EZRA POUND

Himself Hold Ideas Man
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
EZRA POUND

Care Concept Genius Inferior Madness Public
Rhythm must have meaning.
EZRA POUND

Meaning One Liner Rhythm
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
EZRA POUND

Expression Genius Man Mode Right
The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
EZRA POUND

Book Generation Learning Lost Transmitted
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.
EZRA POUND

Alive Ball Hands Intense Light One Liner Power Reading

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

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This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

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Popular Authors

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