Ezra Pound Quotes
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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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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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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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Small talk comes from small bones.
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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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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The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
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The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
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Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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The only history that matters is the history we know.
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Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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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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Rhythm must have meaning.
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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 of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
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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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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.
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Any damn fool can be spontaneous.