Ezra Pound quotes - page 5

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates. (Ezra Pound)
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know. View quote
Ezra Pound
And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean, for things they didn't know, But that time seems to be passing. View quote
Ezra Pound
How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity [...] Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity. View quote
Ezra Pound
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it. View quote
Ezra Pound
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity. View quote
Ezra Pound
Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that The rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. View quote
Ezra Pound
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)
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement. View quote
Ezra Pound
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two. View quote
Ezra Pound
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti. (Ezra Pound)
See, they return ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back. View quote
Ezra Pound
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea. View quote
Ezra Pound
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. View quote
Ezra Pound
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion. View quote
Ezra Pound