Ezra Pound > Quotes

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― 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

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”
― Ezra Pound

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.”
― 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

“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”
― Ezra Pound

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Rhythm must have meaning.”
― Ezra Pound

“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.”
― Ezra Pound

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
― Ezra Pound

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.”
― Ezra Pound

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

”
― Ezra Pound

“Man reading ought to be a man intensely alive. The book ought to be a ball of light in his hands. ”
― 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.”
― 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, The Pisan Cantos

“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
― Ezra Pound

“Glance is the enemy of vision.”
― 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

“With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.”
― Ezra Pound

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”
― 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

“The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”
― Ezra Pound

“I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.”
― Ezra Pound

“The Garden

En robe de parade.
- Samain


Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.”
― Ezra Pound

“small talk comes from small bones”
― 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, ABC of Reading

“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 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

“When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.”
― Ezra Pound

“A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.”
― Ezra Pound

“The temple is holy because it is not for sale”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

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

“Song in the Manner of Housman"

O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were dead already.

The bird sits on the hawthorn tree
But he dies also, presently.
Some lads get hung, and some get shot.
Woeful is this human lot.
Woe! woe, etcetera....

London is a woeful place,
Shropshire is much pleasanter.
Then let us smile a little space
Upon fond nature's morbid grace.
Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera....”
― Ezra Pound

“Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.”
― Ezra Pound

“No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”
― 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.
(excerpt from 'The Garrett')”
― Ezra Pound

“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.”
― Ezra Pound

“The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“What thou lovest well remains, ”
― Ezra Pound

“Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.”
― Ezra Pound

“All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.”
― 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, Selected Poems

“You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind- with one thought less, each year.”
― Ezra Pound

“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.”
― Ezra Pound

“Your interest is in the bloody loam but what I'm after is the finished product.”
― Ezra Pound

“ The Lake Isle

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.”
― 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