Wallace Stevens quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Wallace Stevens has a lot to say. In this list we present the 68 best Wallace Stevens quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Wallace Stevens quotes
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
— Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
— Wallace Stevens
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
— Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
— Wallace Stevens
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after.
— Wallace Stevens
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
— Wallace Stevens
One must read poetry with one’s nerves.
— Wallace Stevens
The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
— Wallace Stevens
The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.
— Wallace Stevens
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
— Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
— Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the scholar’s art.
— Wallace Stevens
Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
— Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
A poem is a meteor.
— Wallace Stevens
There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.
— Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.
— Wallace Stevens
The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colorsAs small as fish-eggs.The threadsWill abash him.Third GirlOh, la…le pauvre!I shall run before him, With a curious puffing.He will bend his ear then.I shall whisperHeavenly labials in a world of gutturals.It will undo him.
— Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
— Wallace Stevens
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
— Wallace Stevens
All history is modern history.
— Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too, That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.
— Wallace Stevens
The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound
— Wallace Stevens
The mind can never be satisfied.
— Wallace Stevens
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
— Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
— Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
It matters, because everything we sayOf the past is description without place, a castOf the imagination, made in sound;And because what we say of the future must portend, Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to beLike rubies reddened by rubies reddening.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.Use dusky words and dusky images.Darken your speech.Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, Conceiving words, As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence, And out of their droning sibilants makesA serenade.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
He heard her low accord, Half prayer and half ditty, And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity.This is not writIn any book.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyr’s bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The lightIn the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snowAt the end of winter when afternoons return.Pink and white carnations – one desiresSo much more than that. The day itselfIs simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round, With nothing more than the carnations there.IISay even that this complete simplicityStripped one of all one’s torments, concealedThe evilly compounded, vital IAnd made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.IIIThere would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come backTo what had been so long composed.The imperfect is our paradise.Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
— Wallace Stevens
It was soldier’s went marching over the rocks, and still they came in watery flocks, because it was spring and the birds had to come, No doubt that soldier’s had to be marching, and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling
— Wallace Stevens
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
— Wallace Stevens
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
— Wallace Stevens
If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the rooms and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghostOr Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang outHis stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.
— Wallace Stevens
There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things
— Wallace Stevens
Consider the odd morphology of regret.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief.Ideas are men. The mass of meaning andThe mass of men are one. Chaos is notThe mass of meaning. It is three or fourIdeas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.In the end, these philosophic assassins pullRevolvers and shoot each other. One remains.The mass of meaning becomes composed again.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
The death of one god is the death of all.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
A change of style is a change of meaning.
— Wallace Stevens
From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
It is deep January. The sky is hard.The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
— Wallace Stevens
Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon …
— Wallace Stevens
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
— Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
— Wallace Stevens
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
— Wallace Stevens
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
— Wallace Stevens
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
— Wallace Stevens
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
— Wallace Stevens
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
— Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
— Wallace Stevens
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.
— Wallace Stevens
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
— Wallace Stevens
We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
— Wallace Stevens
The imagination is man’s power over nature.
— Wallace Stevens
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.
— Wallace Stevens
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.
— Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
— Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
— Wallace Stevens
Money is a kind of poetry.
— Wallace Stevens
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
— Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
— Wallace Stevens
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