Ezra Pound famous quotes

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
-- Ezra Pound

#Men #Ordinary #Genius

Either move or be moved.
-- Ezra Pound

#Moving #Action #Moved

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
-- Ezra Pound

#Writing #Agents #Way

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
-- Ezra Pound

#Inspirational #Men #What Matters

Literature is news that stays news.
-- Ezra Pound

#Book #Inspiration #Reading

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
-- Ezra Pound

#Language #Humans

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
-- Ezra Pound

#Life #Freedom #Waiting

All great art is born of the metropolis.
-- Ezra Pound

#Art #Cities #Born

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

#Inspirational #Hygiene #Degrees

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

#Dance #Literature

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

#Peace #Real #War

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

#Writing #Language #Clear

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Beautiful #New York #Stars

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
-- Ezra Pound

#Artist #Doe #Literature

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
-- Ezra Pound

#Death #Men #Promise

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
-- Ezra Pound

#Book #Men

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
-- Ezra Pound

#Real #Eye #Light

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

#Change #Book #Men

Rhythm must have meaning.
-- Ezra Pound

#Rhythm

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Writing #Expression #Land

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
-- Ezra Pound

#Age #Literature #Language

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Artist #Giving #Doe

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

#Art #Poetry #Poet

In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.
-- Ezra Pound

#Rose #Poetry #Poet

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

#Men #Criticism #Attention

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
-- Ezra Pound

#Art #Mean #Bears

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

#Black #Crowds #Faces

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Inspirational #Life #Artist

Glance is the enemy of vision.
-- Ezra Pound

#Enemy #Vision #Glances

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
-- Ezra Pound

#Fear #Writing #Optimistic

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

#Dawn #Slender #Fingers

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Despair #Too Late #Void

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
-- Ezra Pound

#Business #Men #Two

The temple is holy because it is not for sale
-- Ezra Pound

#Temples #Holy

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

#Book #Reading #Writing

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
-- Ezra Pound

#Inspirational #Life #Art

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave
-- Ezra Pound

#Poetry #Firsts #Break

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
-- Ezra Pound

#Real #Meditation #Trying

The artist is the antenna of the race.
-- Ezra Pound

#Art #Artist #Race

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

#Ideas #Energy #Vortex

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Art #Needs #Tools

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Art #Tea #Together

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')
-- Ezra Pound

#No Friends #Remember #Rich

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
-- Ezra Pound

#Book #Reading #Men

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
-- Ezra Pound

#Men #Definitions #Madness

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

#Literature

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

#Men #Expression #Genius

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

#Education #Real #Learning

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
-- Ezra Pound

#Stars #Satisfaction

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Book #Reading #Power

Artists are the antennae of the race.
-- Ezra Pound

#Artist #Race

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

#Literature #Pay #Printing

The artist is always beginning.
-- Ezra Pound

#Artist

And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness
-- Ezra Pound

#Song #Mean #Enjoy

What counts is the cultural level
-- Ezra Pound

#Culture

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-- Oh how hideous it is To see three generations of one house gathered together! It is like an old tree with shoots, And with some branches rotted and falling.
-- Ezra Pound

#Fall #House #Tree

Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.
-- Ezra Pound

#Dog #Horse #Aliens

Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
-- Ezra Pound

#Book #Historical #Muse

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.
-- Ezra Pound

#Taken #Genius #Serious

I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it; I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral, Seeing that long standing increases all things regardless of quality.
-- Ezra Pound

#Crush #Death #Long

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
-- Ezra Pound

#Art #World #Invention

install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
-- Ezra Pound

#Writing #Brain #Profession

The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
-- Ezra Pound

#Fear #War #Men

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
-- Ezra Pound

#Poetry #Rhyme #Smack