Ezra Pound Quotes
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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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.
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I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
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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.
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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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.
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The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
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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.
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I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
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In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
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And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness
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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
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Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom.
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USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
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A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
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Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
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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.
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A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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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.
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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.
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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.