Quotes by Ezra Pound
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
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.
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.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.
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.
There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, "It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune."
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
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.
When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.
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.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
