Ezra Pound Quotes
-
Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".
-
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.
-
From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.
-
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.
-
The only history that matters is the history we know.
-
Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
-
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
-
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
-
We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
-
With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
-
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
-
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
-
The real trouble with war modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
-
Quiet this metal! Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire. Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate. Let them draw together the bones of the metal.
-
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
-
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
-
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.