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.
EZRA POUNDAll great art is born of the metropolis.
More Ezra Pound Quotes
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
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Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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The artist is always beginning.
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When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance, poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
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What thou lovest well remains.
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No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
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Liberty is not a right but a duty.
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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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.
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One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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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.
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What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
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Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.
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The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
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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.
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
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The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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