Wallace Stevens Quotes

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

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

Money is a kind of poetry.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

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.

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 is man's power over nature.

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

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

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

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

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.

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

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.