Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 7

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.

It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

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

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

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

It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.

You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

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

On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.