Quotes By Wallace Stevens

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

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

Money is a kind of poetry.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

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

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.

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

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.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

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

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

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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

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

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.

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

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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

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.

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

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.