Quotes By Wallace Stevens

The point of vision and desire are the same.

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.

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

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

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

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

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.

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

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 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.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

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.

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.