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.
EZRA POUNDThe worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
More Ezra Pound Quotes
-
-
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
EZRA POUND -
Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism, the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.
EZRA POUND -
Genius, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
EZRA POUND -
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
EZRA POUND -
Rhythm is form cut into time.
EZRA POUND -
Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.
EZRA POUND -
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
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.
EZRA POUND -
If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.
EZRA POUND -
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.
EZRA POUND -
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
EZRA POUND -
I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
EZRA POUND -
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
EZRA POUND -
All great art is born of the metropolis.
EZRA POUND -
The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
EZRA POUND -
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.
EZRA POUND -
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
EZRA POUND -
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
EZRA POUND -
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
EZRA POUND -
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
EZRA POUND -
Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
EZRA POUND -
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
EZRA POUND -
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
EZRA POUND -
Every great change is simple.
EZRA POUND -
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance, poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
EZRA POUND -
Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
EZRA POUND