Ezra Pound Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Ezra Pound's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet Ezra Pound's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 216 quotes on this page collected since October 30, 1885! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later . . . some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

    Fear   Lying   Believe  
    'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (1920) 'E. P. Ode pour l'èlection de son sèpulcre' pt. 4
  • One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

    Sweet   Feet   Patterns  
    "Affirmations: As for Imagism". The New Age, January 1915.
  • Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.

    Taken   Genius   Way  
  • Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.

    Past   Mind   Masters  
  • The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

    Wall   Emotional   Garden  
    'The Garden' (1916)
  • The what is so much more important than how.

  • 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.

    Ezra Pound (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.253, New Directions Publishing
  • The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

    Art   Poetry   Pigment  
    Ezra Pound, Harriet Zinnes (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.152, New Directions Publishing
  • A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

    Real   Eye   Light  
    Ezra Pound, Harriet Zinnes (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.173, New Directions Publishing
  • Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

    Imbeciles   Fool   Paint  
    Ezra Pound, Harriet Zinnes (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.156, New Directions Publishing
  • Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

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

    Art   Tree   Humanity  
  • 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.

    Despair   Too Late   Void  
  • Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

    Sleep   Men   Discovery  
    Ezra Pound (1952). “Guide to Kulchur”, p.100, New Directions Publishing
  • The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

    Thinking   Order   Law  
  • What thou lovest well remains.

    Elysium   Dross   Wells  
    Cantos no. 81, l. 134 (1948)
  • 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.

    Book   Reading   Forever  
  • Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

    Ezra Pound (1992). “A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours”, p.112, New Directions Publishing
  • I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

  • 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.

    Men   Average   Years  
    Ezra Pound (2016). “Early Poems”, p.30, Courier Dover Publications
  • No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

    Book   Reading   Writing  
    Ezra Pound, Michael Dirda (2010). “ABC of Reading”, p.100, New Directions Publishing
  • Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

    Ezra Pound, Marcella Spann (1964). “Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry”, p.338, New Directions Publishing
  • The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

    "Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry".
  • Quiet this metal! Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire. Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate. Let them draw together the bones of the metal.

    Fire   White   Together  
    Ezra Pound, Michael John King (1982). “Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound”, p.226, New Directions Publishing
  • Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry

    Cantos no. 81, l. 148 (1948)
  • Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

    ABC of Reading (1934) "Warning"
  • Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

    Art   Poetry   Sound  
  • Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-- Oh how hideous it is To see three generations of one house gathered together! It is like an old tree with shoots, And with some branches rotted and falling.

    Fall   House   Tree  
    Ezra Pound (2015). “Delphi Poetical Works of Ezra Pound (Illustrated)”, p.433, Delphi Classics
  • 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.

    Art   Artist   Should  
    Ezra Pound (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.253, New Directions Publishing
  • Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

    Pregnancy   Eye   Squares  
    "Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts".
Page 1 of 8
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 216 quotes from the Poet Ezra Pound, starting from October 30, 1885! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!