Wallace Stevens quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

  • The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • The imagination is man's power over nature.

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

  • At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

  • The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

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

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

  • It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

  • My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."

  • Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

  • Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

  • It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

  • I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

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

  • The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies."

  • There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

  • Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

  • Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There.

  • The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.

  • Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

  • The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

  • Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

  • The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

  • Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

  • 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.

  • Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.

  • 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.

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

  • After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

  • Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.

  • I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

  • The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

  • It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

  • The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.

  • The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

  • We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.

  • All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

  • Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

  • ...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

  • Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

  • The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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

  • True villains are extremely photogenic.

  • The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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

  • 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. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.

  • The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

  • In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be ...

  • The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again....

  • The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.

  • A poem is a meteor.

  • It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was spring and the birds had to come,No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling

  • For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

  • I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

  • A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.These two things are one.

  • After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

  • The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

  • Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

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

  • Man is an eternal sophomore.

  • Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.

  • The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

  • The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

  • I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

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

  • All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

  • Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

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

  • Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

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

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

  • 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.

  • In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

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

  • A change of style is a change of meaning.

  • 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.

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

  • A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

  • A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

  • 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.

  • After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

  • After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world depends

  • All poetry is experimental poetry.

  • Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.

  • An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

  • And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.

  • Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

  • At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

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

  • Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

  • Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

  • Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.

  • Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

  • Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice

  • Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

  • Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost....

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

  • Disillusion is the last illusion.

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

  • Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

  • Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

  • Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.

  • Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share