Wars are made to make debt.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature, Books
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
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Civilization
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Churches, Religion
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.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Art
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
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.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Knowledge, Despair
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Perception, Simplicity
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
—Ezra Pound
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Originality
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Ideas
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books, Literature
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.
—Ezra Pound
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Part of The Whole, Reading, Books
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim… lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Birth
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
—Ezra Pound
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Books
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
—Ezra Pound
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.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Hope
Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Religion, Churches
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: City Life, Cities
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.
—Ezra Pound
The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Music
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
Topics: Books, Literature
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Belief
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stanley Kunitz American Poet
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Rod McKuen American Poet
- Aaron Copland American Composer
- Marianne Moore American Poet
- Czeslaw Milosz Polish-American Poet, Novelist
- John Cage American Composer
- Henry Adams American Historian
- Ernest Hemingway American Author
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