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: Art, Artists, Arts
Genius … is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Genius
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Reading, Books
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Change, Books
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Race, Racism
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
—Ezra Pound
Literature is news that stays news.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Literature
AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
—Ezra Pound
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: City Life, Cities
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.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Death
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
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
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Intelligence
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Temper, Anger
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Christianity
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Talent
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
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
Topics: Identity
‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, bid the world’s hounds come to horn!
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Fame
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
Topics: Passion
If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Opinions, Criticism
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Religion
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
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Education
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
Topics: Music
Wars are made to make debt.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: War
‘Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape’s turn for a night or two.
—Ezra Pound
Topics: Self-Knowledge, Identity
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stanley Kunitz American Poet
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Rod McKuen American Entertainer
- 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
Leave a Reply