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Wallace Stevens Quotes

Poet
Born On
1879-10-02
Died On
1955-08-02
Birth Place
Reading
Death Place
Hartford
Birth Sign
libra
Spouse
Elsie Kachel
Nationality
American
Education
New York Law School (1903), Harvard University, Harvard College
Writers, Poets

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

Wallace Stevens

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Wallace Stevens

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry.

Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Wallace Stevens

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Wallace Stevens

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

Wallace Stevens

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Wallace Stevens

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

Wallace Stevens

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Wallace Stevens

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Wallace Stevens

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Wallace Stevens

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Wallace Stevens

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Wallace Stevens

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Wallace Stevens

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Wallace Stevens

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Wallace Stevens

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Wallace Stevens

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Wallace Stevens

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Wallace Stevens

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

Wallace Stevens

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Wallace Stevens

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Wallace Stevens

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Wallace Stevens

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Wallace Stevens

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Wallace Stevens

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

Wallace Stevens

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

Wallace Stevens

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Wallace Stevens

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Wallace Stevens

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Wallace Stevens

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Wallace Stevens

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Wallace Stevens

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Wallace Stevens