Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Wallace Stevens - Page 5

Man is an eternal sophomore.

Thought tends to collect in pools.

Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.

In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.

Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.

The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.

There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.

Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.

The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.

Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.