Quotes from Ezra Pound

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

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

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

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".

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.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.

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

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass

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

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

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Listen to me, attend me!
And I will breathe into thee a soul,
And thou shalt live for ever.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

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

install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.