Top 180 Ezra Pound Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Technique is the test of sincerity.”

— Ezra Pound

152. “It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”

— Ezra Pound

153. “And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”

— Ezra Pound

154. “Good art however ‘immoral’ is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”

— Ezra Pound

155. “I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic – I mean my motion.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

157. “If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”

— Ezra Pound

158. “There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.”

— Ezra Pound

159. “Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.”

— Ezra Pound

160. “But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.”

— Ezra Pound

161. “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.”

— Ezra Pound

162. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

163. “What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.”

— Ezra Pound

164. “It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.”

— Ezra Pound

165. “The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention – and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.”

— Ezra Pound

166. “That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.”

— Ezra Pound

167. “The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.”

— Ezra Pound

168. “What counts is the cultural level.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

170. “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.”

— Ezra Pound

171. “The critic who doesn’t make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men’s results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That’s what the word means.”

— Ezra Pound

172. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

173. “There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.”

— Ezra Pound

174. “Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.”

— Ezra Pound

175. “The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.”

— Ezra Pound

176. “Yea, and the little earth crumbles beneath our feet and we endure.”

— Ezra Pound

177. “Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.”

— Ezra Pound

178. “The artist is always beginning.”

— Ezra Pound

179. “I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.”

— Ezra Pound

180. “Under white clouds, cielo di Pisa. Out of all this beauty something must come.”

— Ezra Pound

181. “And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness.”

— Ezra Pound

182. “A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.”

— Ezra Pound

183. “The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.”

— Ezra Pound

184. “Properly, we should read for power.”

— Ezra Pound

185. “There is something so degrading – at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade – that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, “he does too much.”

— Ezra Pound

186. “A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.”

— Ezra Pound

187. “I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”

— Ezra Pound

188. “Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.”

— Ezra Pound

189. “In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.”

— Ezra Pound

190. “We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.”

— Ezra Pound

191. “Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.”

— Ezra Pound