Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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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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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
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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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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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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 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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Rhythm must have meaning.
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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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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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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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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Literature is news that stays news.
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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
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Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.