Wallace Stevens Quotes (102 Quotes)

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Beauty is momentary in the mind. The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The Body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of Winter, done repenting.

Its past was a souvenir.

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.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

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

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.

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

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

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

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

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 a blue guitar'.

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

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

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

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

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

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

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

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

It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Just as my fingers on the keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound.

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.

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called 'standing people....'

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

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.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

Is there no change of death in paradise?

The point of vision and desire are the same.

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.

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

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

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

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

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

The imagination is man's power over nature.