Ezra Pound Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

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

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

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

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

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

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

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

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

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

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

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.

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

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

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

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

All great art is born of the metropolis.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

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

One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, until they have seen and lived at least part of their contents

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.

It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.

Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

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

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

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

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.''

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Either move or be moved.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

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

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.

Every great change is simple.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

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.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

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

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

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

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

Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.

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

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

Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence

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

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

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.

And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

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