Top 15 Ezra Pound Quotes

It were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to know wherefore.

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

Truth is great, and stronger than all things. The whole earth calls upon truth, and heaven blesses it. All God’s works quake and tremble, and with him there is nothing unrighteous. Wine is unrighteous, the king is unrighteous, women are unrighteous, all human beings are unrighteous, all their works are unrighteous, and all such things. There is no truth in them and in their unrighteousness they will perish. But truth endures and is strong forever, and lives and prevails forever and ever. With it there is no partiality or preference, but it does what is righteous instead of anything that is unrighteous or wicked. Everyone approves its deeds, and there is nothing unrighteous in its judgment. To it belongs the strength and the kingship and the power and the majesty of all the ages. Blessed be the God of truth!

Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

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

Literature is news that STAYS news.

The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

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

To be men not destroyers

And for one beautiful day there was peace.

All other sins are open,
Usura alone not understood.

A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures