Quotes By Wallace Stevens

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.