Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.

Ezra Pound
AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

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

Ezra Pound
A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour.

Ezra Pound
The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Ezra Pound
Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello."

Ezra Pound
A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at.

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

Ezra Pound
Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash, but I believe Michelangelo never did, so I suppose it is part of the tradition.

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

Ezra Pound