In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality – the principle of order versus the split atom.

— Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound Quotes

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cucc. Groweth sed, and bloweth med, And springth the wude nu, Sing cuccu!

— Ezra Pound

The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand.

— Ezra Pound
Reading

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

— Ezra Pound

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

A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at.

— Ezra Pound

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.

— Ezra Pound

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For 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

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

— Ezra Pound

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

— Ezra Pound
Country

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

— Ezra Pound

No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

— Ezra Pound

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

— Ezra Pound
More Ezra Pound Quote >>
Privacy Policy   7.70ms  0.71MB