Wallace Stevens quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Wallace Stevens on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

God and the imagination are one.

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

There is no wing like meaning

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.

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

It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies.

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

Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.

In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

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

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

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

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

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903

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

Money is a kind of poetry.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.

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

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

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

The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other.

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

God is in me or else is not at all.

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

Disillusion is the last illusion.

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

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

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

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

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 the blue guitar.

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

The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

The windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.

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

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

The poet's function is to make his imagination ... become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud ...

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

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

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.

Consider the odd morphology of regret.

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

After the final no there comes a yes.

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

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.

Imagination is the will of things ...

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

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

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

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

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

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

The mind can never be satisfied.

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

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

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

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

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

The mind is smaller than the eye.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

I was the world in which I walked.

The lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man.

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

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

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

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

The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves.

The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

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

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.

We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.

The word is the making of the world

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

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

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow