Quotes By Wallace Stevens

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The point of vision and desire are the same.

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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

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

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

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

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

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

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.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.