Ezra Pound Quotes

To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence

The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.

It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work.

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.

Many errors,
a little rightness.

Literature is news that STAYS news.

I have gone here and there through the heathen, and I see that they flow in wealth, and think not upon thy commandments.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,
The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,
Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms
Wart of the common-weal,
Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things
Darkness the defiler
Twin evil of envy,
Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things
Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos,
neschek, the crawling evil,
slime, the corrupter of all things,
Poisoner of the fount,
of all fountains, neschek,
The serpent, evil against Nature's increase,
Against beauty

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

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.

My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.