Ezra Pound Quotes

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

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.

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

Song in the Manner of Housman" O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera.... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera.

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

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.

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

What counts is the cultural level

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

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.

'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

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.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

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.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.