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The only history that matters is the history we know.

Ezra Pound

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
EZRA POUND

Addiction Appetite Discover Fact
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry.
EZRA POUND

Artist Green Invention Learning Place True World
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
EZRA POUND

Artist Beginning Discover Invention Worth
To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
EZRA POUND

Build Money Pursue State
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
Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.
EZRA POUND

Bond Imagination Oppression Talk
A little light, like a rushlight to lead back to splendour.
EZRA POUND

Glamour Leadership Light
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
EZRA POUND

Decline Education Literature Nation
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
EZRA POUND

Image Poetry Primary
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
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
Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
EZRA POUND

Blind Lying Press Theory
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
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
EZRA POUND

Approval Ban Believe Music View
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
EZRA POUND

Artist Build Creation Equality Money World
Technique is the test of sincerity.
EZRA POUND

Sincere Technique Test

The only history that matters is the history we know.

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The only history that matters is the history we know.

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