Famous Ezra Pound Quotations

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"A heroic figure... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him."
by 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.''"
by Ezra Pound
"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."
by Ezra Pound
"Literature is news that stays news."
by Ezra Pound
"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
by Ezra Pound
"Men do not understand books until they have had 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."
by Ezra Loomis 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."
by Ezra Pound
"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding."
by Ezra Loomis Pound
"The curse of me & my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort."
by Ezra Loomis Pound
"There is no reason why the same man should like the same book at 18 and at 48."
by Ezra Loomis 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."
by 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."
by Ezra Pound
"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."
by 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."
by Ezra Pound
"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."
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."
by Ezra Pound
"All great art is born of the metropolis."
by Ezra Pound
"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."
by Ezra Pound
"AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??"
by Ezra Pound
"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."
by Ezra Pound
"Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."
by Ezra Pound
"A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."
by Ezra Pound
"If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point."
by Ezra Pound
"'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two."
by Ezra Pound
"The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."
by Ezra Pound
"The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voil? 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, voil? une chose!"
by Ezra Pound
"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."
by Ezra Pound
"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."
by 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."
by Ezra Pound
"The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement."
by 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."
by Ezra Pound
"We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time."
by Ezra Pound
"Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity."
by Ezra Pound
"The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."
by 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 clich?, not from real life."
by Ezra Pound
"I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown."
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."
by Ezra Pound
"Poetry withers and dries out when it leaves music, or at least imagined music, too far behind it. Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets."
by Ezra Pound
"Artists broken against her, Astray, lost in the villages,..."
by Ezra Pound
"Duccio came not by usura nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura..."
by Ezra Pound
"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 mea..."
by Ezra Pound
"I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it;..."
by Ezra Pound
"It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom..."
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 art..."
by Ezra Pound
"Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry,"
by Ezra Pound
"May God damn for ever all who cry \'Peace!'"
by Ezra Pound
"no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly..."
by Ezra Pound
"When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid, Siftings on siftings in oblivion,..."
by Ezra Pound


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