Quotes from Ezra Pound

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs I am compelled to conclude That man is the superior animal. When I consider the curious habits of man I confess, my friend, I am puzzled

A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.

what thou lovest well is thy true heritage what thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee

Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection—/in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria

All things are a-flowing,' sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.

In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

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.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

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

There is the subtler music, the clear light Where time burns back about th'eternal embers. We are not shut from the thousand heavens: Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen, Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid, Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysophrase. Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee Nature herself's turned metaphysical, Who can look at that blue and not believe?

And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.

Song in the Manner of Housman" O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung, and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera.... London is a woeful place, Shropshire is much pleasanter. Then let us smile a little space Upon fond nature's morbid grace. Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera....

If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana...and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation.

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.

Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities—

Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

What thou lovest well remains. The rest is dross.

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

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

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'.

Your interest is in the bloody loam but what I'm after is the finished product.

FRANCESCA You came in out of the night And there were flowers in your hands, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you. I who have seen you amid the primal things Was angry when they spoke your name In ordinary places. I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind, And that the world should dry as a dead leaf, Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away, So that I might find you again, Alone.

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don't like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good tastes if you haven't naturally got it.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.