Ezra Pound Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound Quotes & Sayings

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

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

All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days. — Ezra Pound

Artists are the antennae of the race. — Ezra Pound

Rhythm must have meaning. — Ezra Pound

Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing — Ezra Pound

Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people's faces, / Will you find your lost dead among them? — Ezra Pound

A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
(on Ezra Pound) — Gertrude Stein

Any damn fool can be spontaneous. — Ezra Pound

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting. — Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea. — Ezra Pound

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

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

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. — Ezra Pound

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

Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire. — Ezra Pound

Presentation, not reference ... — Ezra Pound

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

America is a lunatic asylum. — Ezra Pound

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation. — Ezra Pound

The natural object is always the adequate symbol. — Ezra Pound

The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace — Ezra Pound

The artist is the antenna of the race. — Ezra Pound

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

Wars are made to make debt. — Ezra Pound

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. — Ezra Pound

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

Go in fear of abstractions. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Properly, we should read for power. — Ezra Pound

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. — Ezra Pound

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. — Ezra Pound

Rhythm is form cut into time. — Ezra Pound

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit. — Ezra Pound

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. — Gertrude Stein

The what is so much more important than how. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation
— Ezra Pound

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

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

Liberty is not a right but a duty. — Ezra Pound

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

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever. — Ezra Pound

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

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. — Ezra Pound

I AM homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me,
friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

All great art is born of the metropolis. — Ezra Pound

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

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf. — Ezra Pound

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

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 — Ezra Pound

More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence. — Ezra Pound

A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at. — Ezra Pound

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me. — Ezra Pound

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace. — Ezra Pound

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it. — Ezra Pound

The only history that matters is the history we know. — Ezra Pound

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

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

Either move or be moved. — Ezra Pound

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

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

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE. — Ezra Pound

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing. — Ezra Pound

A heroic figure ... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language. — Pete Hamill

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

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. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials. — Ezra Pound

Technique is the test of sincerity. — Ezra Pound

Literature is news which stays news. — Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. — Ezra Pound

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