Quotes By Ezra Pound

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

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

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

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.

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

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

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

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

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.

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

Wars are made to make debt.

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.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

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.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

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

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

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

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

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

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

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.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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.