A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
- Ezra Pound Quote

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
- Ezra Pound Quote

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
- Ezra Pound Quote

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
- Ezra Pound Quote

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.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
- Ezra Pound Quote

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
- Ezra Pound Quote

I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
- Ezra Pound Quote

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
- Ezra Pound Quote

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
- Ezra Pound Quote

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 establish his point.
- Ezra Pound Quote

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
- Ezra Pound Quote

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 Quote

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
- Ezra Pound Quote

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
- Ezra Pound Quote

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
- Ezra Pound Quote

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
- Ezra Pound Quote

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
- Ezra Pound Quote

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
- Ezra Pound Quote

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
- Ezra Pound Quote

Wars are made to make debt.
- Ezra Pound Quote

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
- Ezra Pound Quote