Quotes from Ezra Pound

Artists are the antennae of the race.

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

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

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

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

No picture is made to endure nor to live withbut it is made to sell and sell quicklywith usura, sin against nature,is thy bread ever more of stale ragsis thy bread dry as paper.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

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 hellbelieving in old men's lies, the unbelievingcame home, home to a lie.

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

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

With UsuraWith usura hath no man a house of good stoneeach block cut smooth and well fitting.

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.The paired butterflies are already yellow with AugustOver the grass in the West garden;They hurt me. I grow older.

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

A heroic figure... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.

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

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.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

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.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.