Ezra Pound

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

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

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

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later . . . some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

The author's conviction on this day of 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; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

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

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.

The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.