Quotes By Wallace Stevens

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.

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

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.

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.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

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

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

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

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.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

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.