Ezra Pound Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote make it new
on his bath tub.

Ezra Pound
Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

Ezra Pound
We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

Ezra Pound
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

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

Ezra Pound
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.

Ezra Pound
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

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
Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

Ezra Pound
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

Ezra Pound
And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness

Ezra Pound
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

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
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

Ezra Pound
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.

Ezra Pound
And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean, for things they didn't know,
But that time seems to be passing.

Ezra Pound
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Ezra Pound
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

Ezra Pound
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

Ezra Pound
One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one was right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say 17 or 23.

Ezra Pound
The history of an art is the history of master-work, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Ezra Pound
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

Ezra Pound
Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Ezra Pound
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

Ezra Pound