110+ Wallace Stevens Quotes On Education, Nature And World

Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879 and died in Hartford, Connecticut in 1955. He is known for his use of philosophical and metaphysical themes and imagery in his poetry. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Wallace Stevens on education, life, nature.

Top 10 Wallace Stevens Quotes

1. The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. True villains are extremely photogenic.
5. The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
6. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
7. The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
8. The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
9. It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
10. At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

Wallace Stevens Short Quotes

• One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
• The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
• Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
• Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
• Disillusion is the last illusion.
• Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
• Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
• Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
• I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
• A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Life

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation. — Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. — 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

Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. — 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

Life is the elimination of what is dead. — Wallace Stevens

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. — Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. — Wallace Stevens

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life. — Wallace Stevens

The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Nature

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

The imagination is man's power over nature. — Wallace Stevens

Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs. — Wallace Stevens

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world? — Wallace Stevens

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential. — Wallace Stevens

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses. — Wallace Stevens

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About World

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. — Wallace Stevens

I was the world in which I walked. — 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. — Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world. — Wallace Stevens

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? — Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Love

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? — 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

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. — Wallace Stevens

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate. — Wallace Stevens

Next to love is the desire for love. — Wallace Stevens

Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Poetry

The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. — 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

Poetry is a means of redemption. — Wallace Stevens

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

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs. — Wallace Stevens

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet. — Wallace Stevens

At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Imagination

God and the imagination are one. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

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. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

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. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Imaginative

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the will of things. . . . — Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Poet

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence. — Wallace Stevens

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends. — Wallace Stevens

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter. — Wallace Stevens

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words. — Wallace Stevens

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself. — Wallace Stevens

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it. — Wallace Stevens

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes About Books

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend? — Wallace Stevens

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. — 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 house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing. — Wallace Stevens

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. — Wallace Stevens

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood. — Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art. — Wallace Stevens

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire. — Wallace Stevens

Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood. — Wallace Stevens

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

How red the rose that is the soldier — Wallace Stevens

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise! — Wallace Stevens

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture. — Wallace Stevens

If sex were all, then every trembling handCould make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. — Wallace Stevens

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors. — Wallace Stevens

Realism is a corruption of reality. — Wallace Stevens

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. — Wallace Stevens

The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go. — Wallace Stevens

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. — 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

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic. — 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

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice — Wallace Stevens

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. — Wallace Stevens

Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate. — Wallace Stevens

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur. — Wallace Stevens

the windy sky Cries out a literate despair. — Wallace Stevens

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. — Wallace Stevens

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints. — Wallace Stevens

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow. — Wallace Stevens

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

We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. — Wallace Stevens

The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again. — Wallace Stevens

The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths. — Wallace Stevens

It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight. — Wallace Stevens

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be. — Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains,The only moving thingWas the eye of the blackbird. — Wallace Stevens

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so. — Wallace Stevens

Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. — Wallace Stevens

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces. — Wallace Stevens

The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-eggs. The threads Will abash him. Third Girl Oh, la...le pauvre! I shall run before him, With a curious puffing. He will bend his ear then. I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals. It will undo him. — Wallace Stevens

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal. — Wallace Stevens

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold. — Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreamsAnd our desires. — Wallace Stevens

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun. — 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. — Wallace Stevens

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into. — Wallace Stevens

Life Lessons by Wallace Stevens

1. Wallace Stevens' poetry encourages us to appreciate the beauty of everyday life and to remain open to the possibilities of life. He also emphasizes the importance of creativity and imagination, urging us to explore our innermost thoughts and feelings. Finally, he reminds us to take joy in the simple things, to be mindful of our surroundings, and to strive for balance in our lives.