"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight"
— 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

"Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds."
— 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

"Literature is news that stays news."
— Ezra Pound (ABC of Reading)

"No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
— 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

"Rhythm must have meaning."
— Ezra Pound

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

"L'art

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes."
— 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)

"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

"'All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days. "
— Ezra Pound

"Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds."
— 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

"Literature is news that stays news. "
— Ezra Pound

"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight."
— Ezra Pound

"A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit."
— 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)

"And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth."
— Ezra Pound (Selected Poems)

"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

"Your interest is in the bloody loam but what I'm after is the finished product."
— Ezra Pound

"Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press."
— 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

"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

"Literature is news that STAYS news."
— Ezra Pound

"Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market."
— 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

"This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man."
— 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)

"There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th'eternal embers.
We are not shut from the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysophrase.

Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee
Nature herself's turned metaphysical,
Who can look at that blue and not believe?"
— Ezra Pound

"My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration. "
— Ezra Pound

"small talk comes from small bones"
— Ezra Pound

"Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection—/in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria"
— Ezra Pound

"Things have ends (or scopes) and beginnings. To/ know what precedes and what follows will assist yr/ comprehension of process."
— Ezra Pound

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

"Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing."
— Ezra Pound

"Glance is the enemy of vision."
— Ezra Pound

"yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation
"
— 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