Ezra Pound quotes:

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • All great art is born of the metropolis.

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • 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. Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind."

  • 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.

  • Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

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

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

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

  • The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it.

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • The artist is the antenna of the race.

  • 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.

  • You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

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

  • I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

  • Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')

  • The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

  • The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

  • 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.

  • As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

  • Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

  • Wars are made to make debt.

  • In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

  • 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 Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

  • There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

  • 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.

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

  • Literature is news that stays news.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

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

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

  • The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.

  • The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

  • The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

  • 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.

  • Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

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

  • Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.

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

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

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

  • The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

  • 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.

  • Literature is language charged with meaning

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

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

  • small talk comes from small bones

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

  • We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

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

  • All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Poetry must be as well written as prose.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • Either move or be moved.

  • 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.

  • Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

  • Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

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

  • Liberty is not a right but a duty.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

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

  • 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

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

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

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

  • What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

  • Every great change is simple.

  • The only history that matters is the history we know.

  • America is a lunatic asylum.

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