Quotes by Pound, Ezra

"There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed."

Pound, Ezra on death
6 fans of this quote   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on despair   

"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."

Pound, Ezra on economy and economics   

"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding."

Pound, Ezra on education   

"I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion."

Pound, Ezra on exile   

"'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!"

Pound, Ezra on fame   

"AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??"

Pound, Ezra on fascism   

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."

Pound, Ezra on freedom
3 fans of this quote   

"Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."

Pound, Ezra on generalizations   

"A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."

Pound, Ezra on genius
6 fans of this quote   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on heresy   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on hope   

"People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf."

Pound, Ezra on ideas   

"The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voil? 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, voil? une chose!"

Pound, Ezra on identity   

"The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."

Pound, Ezra on image   

"It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images."

Pound, Ezra on imagination   

"You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag."

Pound, Ezra on innovation   

"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."

Pound, Ezra on intelligence and intellectuals   

"The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand."

Pound, Ezra on intelligence and intellectuals   

"A heroic figure... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him."

Pound, Ezra on jesus christ
5 fans of this quote   

"Literature is news that stays news."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

Pound, Ezra on literature   

"I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them."

Pound, Ezra on madness   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on marriage   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on music   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on music   

"It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio."

Pound, Ezra on paradise   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on passion   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on past   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on patronage   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on art   

"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."

Pound, Ezra on art   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on art   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on creation   

"The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."

Pound, Ezra on racism   

"Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art."

Pound, Ezra on religion   

"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."

Pound, Ezra on scholars and scholarship