Ezra Pound Men Quotations

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

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

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

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

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

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

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

Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, until they have seen and lived at least part of their contents

The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

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.

You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

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

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.