Ezra Pound Quotes

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Language designed to impress builds a gulf. Language to express builds a bridge.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner.

The fight against bad English is not frivolous.

As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.

To reason with poorly chosen words is like using a pair of scales with inaccurate weights.

I'm so language-based and I'm so about communicating, and my art has always been very audience-based, and very about being functional and communicating something, and about feeling like I have to be heard.

One can usually put one's thoughts better in one's own words.

Words are the dress of thoughts; which should no more be presented in rags, tatters, and dirt than your person should.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

You have to think not about what you mean but about what people hear.

Within seconds thoughts become words that slip off our tongue and into the world. Pausing before we speak may seem cumbersome, but it allows us to decide: Is this helpful? Does this need to be said now? What is the best way to say this?

I love words but I don't like strange ones. You don't understand them and they don't understand you. Old words is like old friends, you know 'em the minute you see 'em.

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.

Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

If you say three things, you don't say anything.

I am such a person of words. I've spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off.

Speech ... is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.

We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

You gave us power in our words, so I think before I speak, and that way when I speak, they know I'm here to teach.

I think language is the most important thing that human beings have ever accomplished, and the only thing that's really going to get us all out of the troubles that we find ourselves in.

Words are often things also, and very precious, especially on the gravest occasions. Without "words," and the truth of things that is in them, what were we?

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.