Words matter. These are the best Wallace Stevens Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Money is a kind of poetry.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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.
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
One’s ignorance is one’s chief asset.
One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
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.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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.
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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.
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
The point of vision and desire are the same.
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
