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.
Literature is news that stays news.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
Wars are made to make debt.
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.
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.
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
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.
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila 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, voila une chose!
Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic - I mean my motion.
