Ezra Pound Quotes
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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.
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
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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.
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The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.
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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.
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Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
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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.
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That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.
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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.
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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
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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.
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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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.
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Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
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Liberty is not a right but a duty.
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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
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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.
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There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.
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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.
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Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
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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.
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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.