Ezra Pound > Quotes

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“Rhythm must have meaning.”
― 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

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

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

“Glance is the enemy of vision.”
― 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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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