Wallace Stevens Quotes about Imagination

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

God and the imagination are one.

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

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

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.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.

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

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

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.