Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

Ezra Pound
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which doesn't reveal something…Go in fear of abstractions.

Ezra Pound
A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures

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

Ezra Pound
Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

Ezra Pound
It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work.

Ezra Pound
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity
[...]
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity

Ezra Pound
Quiet this metal!
Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire.
Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate.
Let them draw together the bones of the metal.

Ezra 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.

Ezra Pound
The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.

Ezra Pound
Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work. Leisure is spare time free from anxiety.

Ezra Pound
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

Ezra Pound
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Ezra Pound
All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.

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.

Ezra Pound
Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence

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

Ezra Pound
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor"... walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

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

Ezra Pound