Ezra Pound Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Rhythm must have meaning.

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

The artist is the antenna of the race.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every great change is simple.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

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

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')

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

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

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.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

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

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

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

Glance is the enemy of vision.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.