We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Ezra Pound Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
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.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Either move or be moved.
Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
Genius… is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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.
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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.
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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.
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
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.
