38 Quotes by Wallace Stevens
- Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
- Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
- Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
- 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.
- 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.
- Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
- One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
- Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
- Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
- 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.
- 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.
- Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
- The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
- One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
- I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
- How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
- Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
- After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
- A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
- A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
- Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
- Money is a kind of poetry.
- It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
- It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
- In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
- In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
- If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
- 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.
- The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
- The point of vision and desire are the same.
- The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
- The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
- Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
- The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
- The poet is the priest of the invisible.
- The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
- The imagination is man's power over nature.
- We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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