Ezra Pound Quotes

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.

Grandeur . . . consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.