Quotes by Stevens, Wallace

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on egotism   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on fiction   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on imagination   

"The imagination is man's power over nature."

Stevens, Wallace on imagination   

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

Stevens, Wallace on intolerance   

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

Stevens, Wallace on literature   

"As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible."

Stevens, Wallace on literature   

"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."

Stevens, Wallace on literature   

"One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be."

Stevens, Wallace on modern and modernism   

"They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar."

Stevens, Wallace on music   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on myth   

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

Stevens, Wallace on pettiness   

"The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence."

Stevens, Wallace on philosophers and philosophy   

"Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them."

Stevens, Wallace on philosophers and philosophy   

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

Stevens, Wallace on photography   

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

Stevens, Wallace on poetry and poets   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on proverbs   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on reality   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on reality   

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

Stevens, Wallace on spring   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on style   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on sun   

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

Stevens, Wallace on thoughts and thinking   

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."

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

Stevens, Wallace on unknown   

"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."

Stevens, Wallace on weakness   

"To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."

Stevens, Wallace on youth   

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

Stevens, Wallace on civilization   

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

Stevens, Wallace on complexity