Ezra Pound Quotes
-
America is a lunatic asylum.
-
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
-
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.
-
Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
-
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
-
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
-
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.
-
Every great change is simple.
-
To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.
-
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.
-
Wars are made to make debt.
-
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
-
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
-
Either move or be moved.
-
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
-
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
-
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.