Ezra Pound Quotes
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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Rhythm must have meaning.
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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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Literature is news that stays news.
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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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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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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 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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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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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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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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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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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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Wars are made to make debt.
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To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.
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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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Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
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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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Either move or be moved.
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
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America is a lunatic asylum.