Ezra Pound Quotes
-
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
-
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
-
Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
-
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.
-
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
-
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 Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
-
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
-
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
-
The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
-
And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
-
Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
-
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
-
Wars are made to make debt.
-
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
-
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.
-
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
-
Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
-
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
-
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
-
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.
-
Literature is news that stays news.
-
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
-
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.