Ezra Pound

Poet

59 Quotes

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

Wars are made to make debt.

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

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

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

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

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

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

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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

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.

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.

Jika kesusastraan suatu bangsa menurun, bangsa itu berhenti berkembang dan membusuk.

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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