Ezra Pound Quotes
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
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America is a lunatic asylum.
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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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If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.
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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.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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Every great change is simple.
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The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
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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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Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
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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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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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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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The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)