Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.
– Wallace Stevens
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
– Wallace Stevens
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
– 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
The imagination is man's power over nature.
– Wallace Stevens
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.
– Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
– Wallace Stevens
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
– 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
Money is a kind of poetry.
– Wallace Stevens
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
– Wallace Stevens
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
– Wallace Stevens
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
– 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
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
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
– Wallace Stevens
Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
– Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
– Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
– Wallace Stevens
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.