Top 180 Ezra Pound Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.”

— Ezra Pound

103. “Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.”

— Ezra Pound

104. “When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.”

— Ezra Pound

105. “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.”

— Ezra Pound

106. “Rhythm must have meaning.”

— Ezra Pound

107. “As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.”

— Ezra Pound

108. “Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family – Oh how hideous it is To see three generations of one house gathered together! It is like an old tree with shoots, And with some branches rotted and falling.”

— Ezra Pound

109. “Poetry is about as much a ‘criticism of life’ as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.”

— Ezra Pound

110. “Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”

— Ezra Pound

111. “And I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts.”

— Ezra Pound

112. “All great art is born of the metropolis.”

— Ezra Pound

113. “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.”

— Ezra Pound

114. “No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.”

— Ezra Pound

115. “A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”

— Ezra Pound

116. “Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.”

— Ezra Pound

117. “Poetry must be as well written as prose.”

— Ezra Pound

118. “The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”

— Ezra Pound

119. “The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.”

— Ezra Pound

120. “Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!”

— Ezra Pound

121. “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”

— Ezra Pound

122. “I think an alliance with Stalin’s Russia is rotten.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

124. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

125. “But I am like the grass, I can not love you.”

— Ezra Pound

126. “Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.”

— Ezra Pound

127. “The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace.”

— Ezra Pound

128. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

129. “No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.”

— Ezra Pound

130. “Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.”

— Ezra Pound

131. “Any damn fool can be spontaneous.”

— Ezra Pound

132. “And if you ask how I regret that parting: It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end Confused, whirled in a tangle. What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart. I.”

— Ezra Pound

133. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

134. “The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.”

— Ezra Pound

135. “Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.”

— Ezra Pound

136. “It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.”

— Ezra Pound

137. “A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.”

— Ezra Pound

138. “Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.”

— Ezra Pound

139. “In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality – the principle of order versus the split atom.”

— Ezra Pound

140. “Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

145. “Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.”

— Ezra Pound

146. “The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.”

— Ezra Pound

147. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

148. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

149. “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’.”

— Ezra Pound

150. “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.”

— Ezra Pound