98 Inspirational Quotes By Wallace Stevens, The Author Of The Collected Poems

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Wallace Stevens

  

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

Nature Like

Wallace Stevens

  

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.

I

Wallace Stevens

  

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Death Beautiful

Wallace Stevens

  

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Wallace Stevens

  

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

You

Wallace Stevens

  

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Wallace Stevens

  

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

Me I

Wallace Stevens

  

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

Wallace Stevens

  

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

Wallace Stevens

  

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.

You Believe Belief

Wallace Stevens

  

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

Like

Wallace Stevens

  

The imperfect is our paradise.

Wallace Stevens

  

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

Wallace Stevens

  

The mind can never be satisfied.

Never

Wallace Stevens

  

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Wallace Stevens

  

I am what is around me.

Me I

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

  

The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

Wallace Stevens

  

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

I

Wallace Stevens

  

In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

Wallace Stevens

  

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Wallace Stevens

  

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Wallace Stevens

  

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

I

Wallace Stevens

  

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

Together

Wallace Stevens

  

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

Never Children

Wallace Stevens

  

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

Me I

Wallace Stevens

  

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

Alone

Wallace Stevens

  

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

I

Wallace Stevens

  

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

Need I

Wallace Stevens