Ezra Pound Quotes
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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Rhythm must have meaning.
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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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Literature is news that stays news.
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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.
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The artist is the antenna of the race.
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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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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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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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It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
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It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.
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Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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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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To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.
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Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
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I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
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Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.
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No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
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Either move or be moved.