Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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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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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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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.
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Presentation, not reference.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
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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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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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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.
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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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I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.