Quotes from Wallace Stevens

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

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.

Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

A poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.

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

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

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.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

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

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

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

behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

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

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

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

The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.