Ezra Pound quotes and aphorisms, a collection of his literary creations that resonate across generations. From the depths of poetry to the heights of philosophy, Pound’s words encapsulate the essence of human experience. Let his insights inspire and provoke thought in your journey through life.
USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
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
There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, “It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.”
Ezra Pound
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
Ezra Pound
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
Ezra Pound
Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.
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.
Ezra Pound
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound
A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
Ezra Pound
I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
Ezra Pound
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
Glance is the enemy of vision.
Ezra Pound
The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
Ezra Pound
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.
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.
Ezra Pound
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
Ezra Pound
The natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Ezra Pound
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Ezra Pound
Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
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.
Ezra Pound
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Ezra Pound
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Ezra Pound
All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Ezra Pound
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
Ezra Pound
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
Ezra Pound
It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.
Ezra Pound
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
Ezra Pound
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
Ezra Pound
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 cliche, not from real life.
Ezra Pound
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
Ezra Pound
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.
Ezra Pound
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic – I mean my motion.
Ezra Pound
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
The jargon of these 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.
Ezra Pound
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
Ezra Pound
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
Ezra Pound
You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag.
Ezra Pound
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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.
Ezra Pound
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
Ezra Pound
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
Ezra Pound
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
Ezra Pound
The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
Ezra Pound
Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a “country run by Jews”.
Ezra Pound
If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.
Ezra Pound
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound
Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.
Ezra Pound
America is a lunatic asylum.
Ezra Pound
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
Ezra Pound
It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
Ezra Pound
What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
Ezra Pound
When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.
Ezra Pound
To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
Ezra Pound
The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
Ezra Pound
Wars are made to make debt.
Ezra Pound
The what is so much more important than how.
Ezra Pound
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
Ezra Pound
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
Ezra Pound
Either move or be moved.
Ezra Pound
Liberty is not a right but a duty.
Ezra Pound
Every great change is simple.
Ezra Pound
Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
Ezra Pound
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
Ezra Pound
Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron… I should have been able to do better.
Ezra Pound
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
Ezra Pound
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
Ezra Pound
I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.
Ezra Pound
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
Ezra Pound
Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
Ezra Pound
Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
Where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.
Ezra Pound
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Ezra Pound
There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.
Ezra Pound
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
Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
Ezra Pound
Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.
Ezra Pound
Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
Ezra Pound
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Rhythm is form cut into time.
Ezra Pound
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.
Ezra Pound
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
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.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
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
Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
Ezra Pound
Learn of the green world what can be thy place in scaled invention or true artistry.
Ezra Pound
The artist is the antenna of the race.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
Ezra Pound
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
Ezra Pound
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Ezra Pound
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
Ezra Pound
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
Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.
Ezra Pound
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Ezra Pound
Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
Ezra Pound
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Ezra Pound
The artist is always beginning.
Ezra Pound
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
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.
Ezra Pound
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Ezra Pound
Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
Ezra Pound
I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
Ezra Pound
Small talk comes from small bones
Ezra Pound
From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.
Ezra Pound
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
Ezra Pound
The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.
Ezra Pound
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
Ezra Pound
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
Ezra Pound
Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Ezra Pound
A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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.
Ezra Pound
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
Ezra Pound
Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence
Ezra Pound
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
Ezra Pound
Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
Ezra Pound
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
Ezra Pound
Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound
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
Rhythm must have meaning.
Ezra Pound
To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.
Ezra Pound
A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
Ezra Pound
It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
Ezra Pound
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
Ezra Pound
I think an alliance with Stalin’s Russia is rotten.
Ezra Pound
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
Presentation, not reference.
Ezra Pound
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.
Ezra Pound
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom.
Ezra Pound
Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
Ezra Pound
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.
Ezra Pound
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
Ezra Pound
The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand.
Ezra Pound
Poetry is about as much a ‘criticism of life’ as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
Ezra Pound
What counts is the cultural level
Ezra Pound
Install me in any profession Save this damn’d profession of writing, where one needs one’s brains all the time.
Ezra Pound
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
Ezra Pound
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
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
Ezra Pound
The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.
Ezra Pound
Quiet this metal! Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire. Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate. Let them draw together the bones of the metal.
Ezra Pound
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
Ezra Pound
With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
Ezra Pound
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