Wallace Stevens Quotations

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

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

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

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

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.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

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.

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 only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

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

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

The point of vision and desire are the same.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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.

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.

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

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

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.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

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.

Just as my fingers on the keys / Make music, so the selfsame sounds / On my spirit make a music, too. / Music is feeling, then, not sound.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,/ You do not play things as they are."/ The man replied, "Things as they are/ Are changed upon a blue guitar.

They said, ''You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, ''Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.''

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman

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.

Beauty is momentary in the mind / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal. / The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud....

It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.

behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

One ought not to hoard culture . It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes...

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being....

After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.

The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice....

The mind is smaller than the eye.

It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.

What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.