Wallace Stevens famous quotes

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Imagination #Force #Forces Of Nature

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

#Journey #Way #World

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

#Inspirational #Beautiful #Travel

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Summer #Night #Perfection

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

#Water #People #Shapes

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Ice Cream #Culinary #Emperor

We live in an old chaos of the sun.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Sun #Chaos

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Crush #Men #Garden

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Summer #Book #Night

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Science #Thinking #Observation

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

#Dark #Light #Imagination

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Truth #Hiking #Lakes

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

#Beauty #Art #Would Be

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

#Beautiful #Mother #Flower

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

#Thinking #Differences #Window

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Real #Imagination #May

The imperfect is our paradise.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Paradise #Imperfect

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Needs #Bliss #Feels

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Moving #Rivers #Flying

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

#Everyday #World

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Perception #Essentials

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Old Things #Life And Death #People

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Philosophy #Philosopher #Poet

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#New York #Stupid #Mirrors

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

#Would Be #World

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

#Boredom #Scholar

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

#Love #Writing #Ideas

God is in me or else is not at all.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Spirituality

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
-- Wallace Stevens

#Nature #Spring #Silly

The poet is the priest of the invisible.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Poetry #Invisible #Poet

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.'
-- Wallace Stevens

#Men #Play #Blue

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Writing #Men #Poetry

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

#Funny Basketball #Originality

The imagination is man's power over nature.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Men #Imagination #Creative

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Life #Character #Weather

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Life #Men #Ignorant

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Coffee #Cognac

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Reality #Metaphor #Unreal

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Time #Mind #Proud

The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Life #Country #Blue

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Hands #Giving #Gold

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice....
-- Wallace Stevens

#Winter #Men #Ice

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
-- Wallace Stevens

#People #Peculiar #Gracious

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Beautiful

It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Rome #Speech #Poverty

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Dirty #Silence #Speech

What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
-- Wallace Stevens

#Good Friend #Ideas #Air

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Mind #Sun #Woven

The mind is smaller than the eye.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Eye #Mind

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

#Philosophical #Clouds #Speech

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Art #Poetry #Style

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Running #Horse #Time

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Poetry #Achieve #Music Is

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

#World

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

#Mirrors #Crowds #Foolish

Man is an eternal sophomore.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Men #Sophomore

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Imagination #Mind #Possibility

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Heaven #Earth #Hell

A change of style is a change of meaning.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Style

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Sex #Hands #Dolls

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Real #Poetry #Perception

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Mind #Perception #Essentials

How red the rose that is the soldier
-- Wallace Stevens

#Rose #Soldier #Red

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Feelings #Emotion #Sentimentality

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

#Philosophy #Science #Philosopher

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Political #Poetic #Economic

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Fall #Passion #Silence

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Real #Night #Opposites

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Reality #Feelings #Increase

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Poet

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Reality #Self #Expression

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Eye #Men #Hands

One ought not to hoard culture . It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Mean #Benefits #Doe

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

#Ethics #Painting

Words of the world are the life of the world.
-- Wallace Stevens

#World

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Dream #Writing #Fate

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Mind #Poet

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

#Opposites #Imagination #Normal

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Play #Imagination #Essentials

The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes...
-- Wallace Stevens

#Space #Matter #Scene

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Winter #Ice #Sky

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Matter #World #Firmament

That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Eye #Animal #Fire

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Wind #Swans #Soul

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

#Order #Rejection #Mud

We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Change #Girl #Violet

The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Blue #Tree #Feelings

Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Mother #Children #Voice

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Summer #Girl #Moving

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Moon #Dirt #World

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

#Desire #Despair #World

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

#Rain #Past #Snow

What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Past #Night #Lasts

And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Angel #Past #Heaven

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud....
-- Wallace Stevens

#Hero #Believe #Mud

On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Real #World #Few Words

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

#Men #Night #World

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.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Literature #Painting #Problem

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Belief #Fury #Poetry Is

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.
-- Wallace Stevens

#Whales #Imagination #Brain