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Quotes by Ezra Pound

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
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
– Ezra Pound
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
Either move or be moved.
– Ezra Pound
Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
– Ezra Pound
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
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
– Ezra Pound
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
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.
– Ezra Pound
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
– Ezra Pound
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic - I mean my motion.
– Ezra Pound
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– 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.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
– Ezra Pound
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
– 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
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
– Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
– Ezra Pound
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
– Ezra Pound
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!
– Ezra Pound
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!
– Ezra Pound
Wars are made to make debt.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
– Ezra Pound
When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.
– Ezra Pound
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
– Ezra Pound
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
– Ezra Pound
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.
– Ezra Pound
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
– Ezra Pound
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
– Ezra Pound