Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Wallace Stevens - Page 2

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

God is in me or else is not at all.

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

The imperfect is our paradise.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics.

I was the world in which I walked.

I am what is around me.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Disillusion is the last illusion.

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

Next to love is the desire for love.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

It is the belief and not the god that counts.

I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.

True villains are extremely photogenic.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

The mind can never be satisfied.

The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.

Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

A change of style is a change of meaning.