Ezra Pound Quotes

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

Every great change is simple.

The what is so much more important than how.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Presentation, not reference.

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.

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.

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

The artist is always beginning.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it.

The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.