Ezra Pound quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Ezra Pound

Top Ezra Pound Quotes

Browse top 74 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ezra Pound.

Favorite Ezra Pound Quotes

1. "Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm." ~ Ezra Pound

2. "L'artGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes." ~ Ezra Pound

3. "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

4. "The thought of what America would be likeIf the Classics had a wide circulationTroubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)" ~ Ezra Pound

5. "Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds." ~ Ezra Pound

6. "And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably." ~ Ezra Pound

7. "Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever." ~ Ezra Pound

8. "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing." ~ Ezra Pound

9. "The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means." ~ Ezra Pound

10. "The eyes of this dead lady speak to meFor here was love, was not to be drowned out.And here desire, not to be kissed away.The eyes of this dead lady speak to me." ~ Ezra Pound

11. "Song in the Manner of Housman" O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera.... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera...." ~ Ezra Pound

12. "M'amour, m'amourwhat do I love andwhere are you?That I lost my centerfighting the worldThe Dreams clashand are shattered-and that I tried to make a paradisoterrestre.I have tried to write ParadiseDo not moveLet the wind speakthat is paradiseLet the Gods forgive what Ihave madeLet those I love try to forgivewhat I have made." ~ Ezra Pound

13. "You have been second always. Tragical?No. You preferred it to the usual thing:One dull man, dulling and uxorious,One average mind- with one thought less, each year." ~ Ezra Pound

14. "????????? ?? ?????? ??? ???????? ?? ??????? ??????????? ?? ??????? ????? --?? ?? ??????????? ???? ??????? ?? ????? ????????.???? ???? ?? ??????? ?? ??????????? ?? ??? ?? ?? ????????????? ???? ???? ???? ? ? ???? ??? ??? ?? ????? ???????::A GirlThe tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breast-- Downward, The branches grow out of me, like arms. Tree you are, Moss you are, You are violets with wind above them. A child -- so high -- you are, And all this is folly to the world" ~ Ezra Pound

15. "Go in fear of abstractions." ~ Ezra Pound

16. "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

17. "When the head of state of family thinks first of gouging out an income, he must perforce do it through small men; and even if they are clever at their job, if one employ such inferior characters in state and family business the tilled fields will go rack swamp and ruin and edged calamities will mount up to the full.... This is the meaning of: A state does not profit by profits - Pound's translation of Confucius" ~ Ezra Pound

18. "Things have ends (or scopes) and beginnings. To/ know what precedes and what follows will assist yr/ comprehension of process." ~ Ezra Pound

19. "ALBA from "Langue d'Oc" When the nightingale to his mate Sings day-long and night late My love and I keep state In bower, In flower, ‘Till the watchman on the tower Cry: "Up! Thou rascal, Rise, I see the white Light And the night Flies." ~ Ezra Pound

20. "The sky-like limpid eyes,The circular infant's face,The stiffness from spats to collarNever relaxing into grace;The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,Showed only when the daylight fellLevel across the faceOf Brennbaum "The Impeccable"." ~ Ezra Pound

21. "There is the mystery of the scattering, the fact that the people who presumably understand each other are geographically scattered. A man who fits in his milieu as Frost does, is to be considered a happy man." ~ Ezra Pound

22. "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. Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind." ~ Ezra Pound

23. "The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth." ~ Ezra Pound

24. "Literature is news which stays news." ~ Ezra Pound

25. "The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation." ~ Ezra Pound

26. "Rhythm must have meaning." ~ Ezra Pound

27. "I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation." ~ Ezra Pound

28. "With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands." ~ Ezra Pound

29. "A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone." ~ Ezra Pound

30. "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough." ~ Ezra Pound

31. "And the days are not full enoughAnd the nights are not full enoughAnd life slips by like a field mouseNot shaking the grass" ~ Ezra Pound

32. "A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." ~ Ezra Pound

33. "What thou lovest well remains,the rest is drossWhat thou lov'st well shall not be reft from theeWhat thou lov'st well is thy true heritage" ~ Ezra Pound

34. "The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension." ~ Ezra Pound

35. "A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit." ~ Ezra Pound

36. "The temple is holy because it is not for sale" ~ Ezra Pound

37. "The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories." ~ Ezra Pound

38. "When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish." ~ Ezra Pound

39. "Man reading ought to be a man intensely alive. The book ought to be a ball of light in his hands." ~ Ezra Pound

40. "Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views." ~ Ezra Pound

41. "small talk comes from small bones" ~ Ezra Pound

42. "I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you." ~ Ezra Pound

43. "Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market." ~ Ezra Pound

44. "When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogsI am compelled to concludeThat man is the superior animal.When I consider the curious habits of manI confess, my friend, I am puzzled" ~ Ezra Pound

45. "The Lake IsleO God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,With the little bright boxespiled up neatly upon the shelvesAnd the loose fragrant cavendishand the shag,And the bright Virginialoose under the bright glass cases,And a pair of scales not too greasy,And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,Lend me a little tobacco-shop,or install me in any professionSave this damn'd profession of writing,where one needs one's brains all the time." ~ Ezra Pound

46. "A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself." ~ Ezra Pound

47. "If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana...and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation." ~ Ezra Pound

48. "My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration." ~ Ezra Pound

49. "Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection—/in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria" ~ Ezra Pound

50. "The immense and undeniable loss of freedoms, as they were in 1900, is undeniable. We have seen the acceleration in efficiency of the tyrannizing factors. It's enough to keep a man worried. Wars are made to make debt. I suppose there's a possible out in space satellites and other ways of making debt." ~ Ezra Pound

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