Ezra Pound Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

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

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

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

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

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

The artist is always beginning.

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.

A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave

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

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

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.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

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

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

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 crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at.

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

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

Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

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

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

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

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

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

It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

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

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

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

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.

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

The what is so much more important than how.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

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

Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.

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.

small talk comes from small bones

Properly, we should read for power.