Ezra Pound Quotes - Page 2

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

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.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Either move or be moved.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

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

To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

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

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass

Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

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

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

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

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

The what is so much more important than how.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

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.