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Ezra Pound Quotes

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"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."
Education

"Literature is news that stays news."

"Either move or be moved."

"When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder."

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."

"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."

"Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."

"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight."

"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

"I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later."

"But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

"Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise."

"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."

"I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know."

"No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."

"Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."

"If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates."

"'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!"

"AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??"

"A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."

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