Ezra Pound Quotes
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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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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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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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One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
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It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
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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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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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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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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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Either move or be moved.
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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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No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
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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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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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Every great change is simple.
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Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
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I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
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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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I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
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I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.