Ezra Pound Quotes
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Literature is news that stays news.
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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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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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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What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
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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.
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See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.
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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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America is a lunatic asylum.
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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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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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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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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What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
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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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Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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Either move or be moved.
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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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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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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.
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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.