Ezra Pound Book Quotations

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

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.

The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.

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.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.

Literature is news that stays news.

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

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

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

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.

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.