Wallace Stevens quotes - page 3

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. (Wallace Stevens)
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Wallace Stevens
All history is modern history.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
Wallace Stevens
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Wallace Stevens
Money is a kind of poetry.
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
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. (Wallace Stevens)
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Wallace Stevens
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Wallace Stevens
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
The point of vision and desire are the same.
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)
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.
Wallace Stevens
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the black bird.
Wallace Stevens
Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens
What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?
Wallace Stevens