Quotes by

Wallace Stevens

Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow. – Wallace Stevens

How full of trifles everything is! It is only ones thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture. – Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird. – Wallace Stevens

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence. – Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other peoples religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other peoples art. – Wallace Stevens

The imagination is mans power over nature. – 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

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

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

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. – 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

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. – Wallace Stevens

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

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

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