Ezra Pound Quotes

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word “God” to be its grammatical subject.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

Being obscure in acronyms is great. I think I'll start making up my own... INYM - I'm Not Your Momma.

S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

I want to see religious instruction and sermons held in German in the mosques. The ideal, in my view, would be for imams to be trained in Germany and to speak our language, just as the Roman Catholic Church now holds mass in German and gave up Latin long ago.

I think a part of it was the way my parents raised me. I think that's part of being raised in a big Latin family. To get an adult's attention you have to do something crazy, and my way was dancing on tables and singing and dancing. That was my way of getting everyone's attention. I'm loud and I like being loud.

Aristotle's opinion... that comets were nothing else than sublunary vapors or airy meteors... prevailed so far amongst the Greeks, that this sublimest part of astronomy lay altogether neglected; since none could think it worthwhile to observe, and to give an account of the wandering and uncertain paths of vapours floating in the Ether.

I think we all know that world owes an enormous debt to Greece and the Greek people.

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad. If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious. You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.

Gobbledygook may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one's clients, or more probably a mixture of both. A system that can't or won't communicate is not a safe basis for a democracy.

I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

Say your prayers. And I'll say mine. Because I really think it helps.

I miss going to church, but I think the Lord understands.

I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.

I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.

The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being-free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies-and therefore you can find out what religion is.

I would like to ask you a question: how many of you pray to the Holy Spirit every day? Probably few, but we must satisfy this desire of Jesus and pray every day to the Holy Spirit, so that he opens our heart towards Jesus.

All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason

The Americans only like things they can label, even if it kills them. Think of those poor Latin American writers. Some of them are very good. But the "magical realism" label has absolutely ruined them. The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.

The person who thought there could be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or ignorant of religion.