Ezra Pound best famous quotes, a brief collection of the most significant aphorisms of the great writer to better understand his poetics and his literary 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.
Ezra Pound
USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
Ezra Pound
I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron… I should have been able to do better.
Ezra Pound
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
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
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
Ezra Pound
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
Ezra Pound
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
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
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
Ezra Pound
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
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 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.
Ezra Pound
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
Ezra Pound
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
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
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Ezra Pound
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
Ezra Pound
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
Ezra Pound
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
Ezra Pound
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
Ezra Pound
It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
Ezra Pound
What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
Ezra Pound
Wars are made to make debt.
Ezra Pound
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
Ezra Pound
Liberty is not a right but a duty.
Ezra Pound
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
Ezra Pound
Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
Ezra Pound
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Ezra Pound
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
Ezra Pound
Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit
Ezra Pound
Poetry is about as much a ‘criticism of life’ as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
Ezra Pound
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