Ezra Pound Quotes

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

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

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

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

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.

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

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.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

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

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 Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

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

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

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

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

What thou lovest well remains.

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

Either move or be moved.

America is a lunatic asylum.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

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

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

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Wars are made to make debt.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

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

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.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.

Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

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

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

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.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

Literature is news that stays news.

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

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

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

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

I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

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

Rhythm is form cut into time.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

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.