Quotes from Ezra Pound

It will be seen that Mr. Wyndham Lewis is right, I am an individual so lacking in personal character, principles, etc., that I am ready to take up with Arnaut Daniel, Arnold Dolmetsch, Propertius, or any photographer in search of abstract design, or a modus of presenting forms moving, and moreover, I remain unrepentant.

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don't NEED schools and colleges to keep 'em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every 80 often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.

To communicate and then stop, that is the law of discourse To go far and come to an end

Another point miscomprehended by people who are clumsy at languages is that one does not need to learn a whole language in order to understand some one or some dozen poems. It is often enough to understand throroughly the poem, and every one of the few dozen of few hundred words that compose it.

And they want to know what we talked about? "de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis", Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms, And of men of unusual genius.

Could you", wrote Mr. Jefferson, "Find me a gardener Who can play the french horn?

I would like to accept C. H.'s book But it would make my own seem so out of date. Heaven will protect The lay reader.

Out of dark, thou, Father Helios, leadest, but the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning.

The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

And Unto thine eyes my heart Sendeth old dreams of the spring-time, Yea of wood-ways my rime Found thee and flowers in and of all streams That sang low burthen, and of roses, That lost their dew-bowed petals for the dreams We scattered o'er them passing by.

The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. Guide to Kulchur.

You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them.

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Literature is news that stays news.

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

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.

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

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

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

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.

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

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.

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