Quotes By Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
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
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
Ezra Pound
The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
Ezra Pound
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Ezra Pound
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
Ezra Pound
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Ezra Pound
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound