Quotes By Ezra Pound

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

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.

The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

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

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

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.

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

Either move or be moved.

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.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

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

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

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.

Literature is news that stays news.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

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

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

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

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

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.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

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.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

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.