Wallace Stevens Quotes

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Wallace Stevens

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 2, 1879

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

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Wallace Stevens

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of 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

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

Wallace Stevens

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry.

Wallace Stevens

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Wallace Stevens

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Wallace Stevens

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.

Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

Wallace Stevens

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

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

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 only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Wallace Stevens