Stevens, Wallace quotes
1879-1955 American PoetCivilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Stevens, Wallace
Civilization
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
Egotism
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Stevens, Wallace
Complexity
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
Fiction
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Stevens, Wallace
Photography
One cannot spend one s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Stevens, Wallace
Modern and Modernism
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
Imagination
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Stevens, Wallace
Literature
Intolerance respecting other people s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people s art.
Stevens, Wallace
Intolerance
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Stevens, Wallace
Literature
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
Myth
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Stevens, Wallace
Literature
The imagination is man s power over nature.
Stevens, Wallace
Imagination
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
Music
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Stevens, Wallace
Pettiness
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
Stevens, Wallace
Philosophers and Philosophy
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Stevens, Wallace
Philosophers and Philosophy
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Stevens, Wallace
Truth
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Stevens, Wallace
Poetry and Poets
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
Sun
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
Proverbs
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Stevens, Wallace
Unknown
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Stevens, Wallace
Thoughts and Thinking
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Stevens, Wallace
Spring
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
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
Reality
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
Style
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
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
Youth