Ezra Pound Quotes

#1. It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.

Ezra Pound

#2. I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality.

Ezra Pound

#3. 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.

Ezra Pound

#4. 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

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

Ezra Pound

#6. The artist is always beginning.

Ezra Pound

#7. Literature is news which stays news.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#9. I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.

Ezra Pound

#10. Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#12. And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring's end,
confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking
There is no end of things in the heart.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#15. Literature is news that stays news.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#17. 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

#18. 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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#20. 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

#21. 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.

Ezra Pound

#22. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Ezra Pound

#23. Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

Ezra Pound

#24. America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#27. 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.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#29. 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')

Ezra Pound

#30. The Encounter"

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#34. There is the mystery of the scattering, the fact that the people who presumably understand each other are geographically scattered. A man who fits in his milieu as Frost does, is to be considered a happy man.

Ezra Pound

#35. Things have ends (or scopes) and beginnings. To/ know what precedes and what follows will assist yr/ comprehension of process.

Ezra Pound

#36. 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

#37. A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

Ezra Pound

#38. A heroic figure ... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.

Ezra Pound

#39. 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.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#42. 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

#43. A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives.
There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#45. 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

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

Ezra Pound

#47. The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Ezra Pound

#48. 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.

Ezra Pound

#49. No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it.

Ezra Pound

#50. 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.

Ezra Pound

#51. The temple is holy because it is not for sale

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#55. Yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#59. Literature is language charged with meaning

Ezra Pound

#60. Every great change is simple.

Ezra Pound

#61. Let the gods speak softly of us

Ezra Pound

#62. Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#64. Presentation, not reference ...

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#67. 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.

Ezra Pound

#68. 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.

Ezra Pound

#69. 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

#70. 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.

Ezra Pound

#71. Rhythm is form cut into time.

Ezra Pound

#72. Where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#74. The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Ezra Pound

#75. Either move or be moved.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#78. 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

#79. If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#83. What counts is the cultural level

Ezra Pound

#84. 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.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#86. small talk comes from small bones

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#88. 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.

Ezra Pound

#89. 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

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#92. 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

#93. The Sea of Glass
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them

Ezra Pound

#94. Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

Ezra Pound

#95. Artists are the antennae of the race.

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

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

Ezra Pound

#98. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me
For here was love, was not to be drowned out.
And here desire, not to be kissed away.
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Ezra Pound

#99. Glance is the enemy of vision.

Ezra Pound

#100. 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.

Ezra Pound