Ezra pound quotes

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

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.

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation, neither are they transmitted by book learning. The mystic tradition, any mystic tradition, is of a similar nature, that is, it is dependent on direct perception, a 'knowledge' as permanent as the faculty for receiving it.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".

All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

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

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.

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

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

The what is so much more important than how.

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.

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.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

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.

Wars are made to make debt.

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.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Either move or be moved.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

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

Properly, we should read for power.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, 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.

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

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.

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

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

Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

small talk comes from small bones

Literature is news that stays news.

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

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

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry

Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.

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.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

America is a lunatic asylum.

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

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

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

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

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!

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

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

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

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

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

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

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

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

What thou lovest well remains.

Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.

Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

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.

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

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

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

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

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.

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

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

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

Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

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

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

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

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

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

Technique is the test of sincerity.

The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

Glance is the enemy of vision.

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.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! 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.

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

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

Every great change is simple.