Ezra Pound quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ezra Pound on Wise Famous Quotes.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities -

The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

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.

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

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection - / We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry

The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

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.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

Wars are made to make debt.

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

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'

It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr.

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Glance is the enemy of vision.

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

Literature is language charged with meaning

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

A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

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

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

small talk comes from small bones

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic
I mean my motion.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

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

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

But I am like the grass, I can not love you.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

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

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

Take thought.
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.

And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Listen to me, attend me!
And I will breathe into thee a soul,
And thou shalt live for ever.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
Ezra Pound

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.

Presentation, not reference ...

The what is so much more important than how.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

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

America is a lunatic asylum.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cucc.
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu,
Sing cuccu!

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

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

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good

If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana ... and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation.