Ezra Pound Quotes - Page 3

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.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

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

Glance is the enemy of vision.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

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

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

What thou lovest well remains.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

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

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

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

Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

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

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

Literature is news that stays news.

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.

It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.