Quotes By Wallace Stevens

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 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.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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.

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

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.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Money is a kind of poetry.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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.

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