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 | 2,487 visits |
Quotations
| • | Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers. 11 |
| • | In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination. 9 |
| • | Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. 8 |
| • | A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. 6 |
| • | I am what is around me. 6 |
| • | God and the imagination are one. 6 |
| • | 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. 6 |
| • | Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. 5 |
| • | Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. 5 |
| • | It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem. 4 |
| • | It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur 4 |
| • | Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking. 4 |
| • | I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office. 3 |
| • | It is never the thing but the version of the thing. 3 |
| • | A change of style is a change of meaning. 3 |
| • | Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. 3 |
| • | The poet is the priest of the invisible. 3 |
Quotes in Verse
| • | Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark. 7 |
| • | Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. 5 |
| • | After the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends 5 |
| • | The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it. 4 |
| • | The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. 4 |
| • | A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one. 4 |
| • | A poem is a meteor. 4 |
| • | Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. 4 |
| • | The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. 3 |
| • | The imagination is man's power over nature. 3 |
