Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Wallace Stevens

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

The imagination is man's power over nature.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

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

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.

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.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

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

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

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.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Money is a kind of poetry.

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

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

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

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

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.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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

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.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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

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

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

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.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

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

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

Make the visible a little hard to see.

I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.