Quotes by
Wallace Stevens |
1879-1955 , American poet
American poet whose work explores the interaction of reality and what man can make of reality in his mind. It was not until late in life that Stevens was read at all widely or recognized as a major poet. | 27 quotes | 2,999 visits |
Quotations
| • | Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers. 12 |
| • | In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination. 10 |
| • | Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. 9 |
| • | 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. 7 |
| • | God and the imagination are one. 7 |
| • | I am what is around me. 7 |
| • | A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. 7 |
| • | Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. 6 |
| • | Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. 6 |
| • | Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking. 5 |
| • | It is never the thing but the version of the thing. 5 |
| • | It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur 5 |
| • | It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem. 5 |
| • | The poet is the priest of the invisible. 4 |
| • | Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. 4 |
| • | A change of style is a change of meaning. 4 |
| • | I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office. 4 |
Quotes in Verse
| • | Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark. 10 |
| • | After the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends 7 |
| • | Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. 7 |
| • | Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. 6 |
| • | The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. 6 |
| • | A poem is a meteor. 5 |
| • | A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one. 5 |
| • | The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it. 5 |
| • | The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. 5 |
| • | The imagination is man's power over nature. 4 |
