Quotes from Ezra Pound

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

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

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.

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

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

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

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

It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

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

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry

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.

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

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

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

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

I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it; I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral, Seeing that long standing increases all things regardless of quality.

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.