Ezra Pound Quotes
-
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.
-
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
-
The real trouble with war modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
-
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
-
The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
-
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.
-
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
-
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.
-
The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
-
The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
-
Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'
-
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.
-
'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.
-
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
-
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.
-
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
-
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
-
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.
-
It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.
-
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.
-
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
-
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.
-
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
-
And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness