Wallace Stevens Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.
At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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.
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.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
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.
It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
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 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
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound
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.
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
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.
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.
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.
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud ...
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.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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.
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood.
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.
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
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.
The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.