Top 180 Ezra Pound Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.”

— Ezra Pound

52. “There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.”

— Ezra Pound

53. “Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.”

— Ezra Pound

54. “Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.”

— Ezra Pound

55. “You have to hammer yourself into an artist.”

— Ezra Pound

56. “I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

58. “The only history that matters is the history we know.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

61. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.”

— Ezra Pound

62. “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.”

— Ezra Pound

63. “All things are a-flowing,′ sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

65. “No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

68. “A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.”

— Ezra Pound

69. “Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

71. “I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

75. “One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.”

— Ezra Pound

76. “This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

80. “A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.”

— Ezra Pound

81. “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.”

— Ezra Pound

82. “Liberty is not a right but a duty.”

— Ezra Pound

83. “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

84. “Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

86. “Let the gods speak softly of us.”

— Ezra Pound

87. “The what is so much more important than how.”

— Ezra Pound

88. “Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities –.”

— Ezra Pound

89. “The public will buy a certain amount of poetry if you give them their striptease.” – Ezra Pound.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

92. “All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.”

— Ezra Pound

93. “The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.”

— Ezra Pound

94. “Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom.”

— Ezra Pound

95. “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

97. “Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”

— Ezra Pound

98. “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

99. “Rhythm is form cut into time.”

— Ezra Pound

100. “Separation on the River Kiang KO-JIN goes west from Ko-kaku-ro, The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river. His lone sail blots the far sky. And now I see only the river, The long Kiang, reaching heaven. Taking.”

— Ezra Pound