99 Motivational Wallace Stevens Quotes

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in the United States of America.

Stevens' family background was Lutheran (a large branch of Protestantism; one of the founders of this great religious movement was the reformer Martin Luther, a German monk). Wallace Stevens was the son of a successful lawyer. He attended Harvard University and then went on to attend the New York Law School, where he graduated with a law degree.

Stevens worked in multiple law organizations, including American Bonding Company. Later, he became the vice president (New York branch) of Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri.

After leaving his earlier job, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company (Hartford, Connecticut). Stevens used to write poetry in his free time and was acquainted with notable writers such as Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. Wallace Stevens worked as an insurance executive and a lawyer and also focused on writing modernist poetry.

In 1923, his first book of poems was released, 'Harmonium', and his other notable works include 'The Man with the Blue Guitar', 'Disillusionment Of Ten O'Clock', 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream', 'The Auroras Of Autumn', 'Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird', 'The Snow Man', 'The Idea Of Order At Key West' and 'Anecdote Of The Jar'. For his contribution to the world of poetry, Stevens was awarded Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Frost Medal, National Book Award for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

In the late 20th century, Wallace Stevens' poems garnered more recognition with critical assessment. Many famous literary critics released books on his poems; during the present times. His tremendous writing volumes are available for everyone to read and to get inspired. Through his poems, Stevens has used diverse interpretations and varied philosophical subjects.

Here are some of his marvelous quotations to understand more about the talented personality with a humorous side!

Read these awe-inspiring quotations by one of the most celebrated poets in America, Wallace Stevens!

"Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into."

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

"Realism is a corruption of reality."

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

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

"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."

"Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof."

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

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

"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real."

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

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

"Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor."

"One's ignorance is one's chief asset."

"I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss."

"A change of style is a change of meaning."

"It is never the thing but the version of the thing."

"A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one."

"After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends."

"We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold."

"There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it."

"The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book."

"The imperfect is our paradise."

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

"in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination."

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is fiction and that you believe in it willingly."

Experience Wallace Stevens's poetry's exquisite outlook and bewildering vision through the following quotations!

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

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

"The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully."

"It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem."

"I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me."

"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."

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

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

"Poetry is an abstraction bloodied."

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

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

"... unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere."

"The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying."

"I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know."

"People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it."

"The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies."

"Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn."

"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.'"

"The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become."

"One must read poetry with one's nerves."

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

"There will never be an end To this droning of the surf."

"Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

"Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs."

"It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self."

"Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires."

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

"The lion sleeps in the sun. its nose on its paws. it can kill a man."

"The poet makes silk dresses out of worms."

(Find out about Wallace Stevens's outlook on various subjects, including poetry and nature!)

Stevens Wallace wrote multiple poems about nature. His fascination with the endless beauty of nature can be explicitly seen through these quotes. Take a look!

"Then the sea and heaven rolled as one and from the two came fresh transfiguring of freshest blue."

"A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth, and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist."

"The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges, and greens Flowering over the skin."

"The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down."

"Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point."

"At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply."

"He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still the sky was blue."

"It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow."

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

"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."

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

"An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses."

"It is not in the premise that reality is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade."

"Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed."

"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."

"At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply."

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

"All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas."

"The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound."

Discover more about what the writer, Wallace Stevens, radiates through his uplifting and stirring quotations!

"Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container."

"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."

"The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives."

"Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing."

"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."

"Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail."

"I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange."

"It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur."

"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have."

"The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself."

"The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction."

"It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life."

"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."

"I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again."

"Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet."

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."

"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."

"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."

"After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir."

"Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough."

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

"Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud."

"New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors."

"I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow."

“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.”