Ezra Pound - Man Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

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

Ezra Pound
The tip's a good one, as for literature
It gives no man a sinecure.
And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.

Ezra Pound
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

Ezra Pound
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

Ezra Pound
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

Ezra Pound
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

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
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
[...]
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
[...]
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly

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
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle 'promise' from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

Ezra Pound
One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

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
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Ezra Pound
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

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

Ezra Pound
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

Ezra Pound
You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

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

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

Ezra Pound