Quotes by Ezra Pound

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

“A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.”

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

“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”

“If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good”

“No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.And give up verse, my boy,There's nothing in it.Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:Don't kick against the pricks,Accept opinion. The Nineties trie...”

“Literature is language charged with meaning”

“When you start searching for pure elements in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant...”

“Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”

“Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.”

“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”

“Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.And the bestial, namely the fanatica...”

“I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seemTo mock me now, all night, all night, andHave I strayed among the cliffs hereThey say, some day I'll fallDown through the sea-bit fissures, and no more...”

“If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.”

“A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”

“If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can esta...”

“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.”

“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.”