Ezra Pound Quotes

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

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

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... view

By: Ezra Pound

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... view

By: Ezra Pound

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art... view

By: Ezra Pound

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use... view

By: Ezra Pound

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents... view

By: Ezra Pound

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary... view

By: Ezra Pound

Literature is news that stays news... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people... view

By: Ezra Pound

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner... view

By: Ezra Pound

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... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

Wars are made to make debt... view

By: Ezra Pound

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder... view

By: Ezra Pound

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries... view

By: Ezra Pound

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it... view

By: Ezra Pound

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism... view

By: Ezra Pound

Either move or be moved... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him... view

By: Ezra Pound

All great art is born of the metropolis... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

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... view

By: Ezra Pound

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture... view

By: Ezra Pound

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY... view

By: Ezra Pound

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point... view

By: Ezra Pound

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one... view

By: Ezra Pound

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown... view

By: Ezra Pound

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

By: Ezra Pound

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist.. view

By: Ezra Pound