Top 160 Wallace Stevens Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world depends.”

— Wallace Stevens

2. “Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”

— Wallace Stevens

3. “Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

5. “God and the imagination are one.”

— Wallace Stevens

6. “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

8. “The imperfect is our paradise.”

— Wallace Stevens

9. “I am what is around me.”

— Wallace Stevens

10. “It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.”

— Wallace Stevens

11. “Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.”

— Wallace Stevens

12. “Anything is beautiful if you say it is.”

— Wallace Stevens

13. “I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.”

— Wallace Stevens

14. “Life is the elimination of what is dead.”

— Wallace Stevens

15. “Money is a kind of poetry.”

— Wallace Stevens

16. “After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun.”

— Wallace Stevens

17. “The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”

— Wallace Stevens

18. “I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.”

— Wallace Stevens

19. “Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.”

— Wallace Stevens

20. “The poet is the priest of the invisible.”

— Wallace Stevens

21. “I was the world in which I walked.”

— Wallace Stevens

22. “A change of style is a change of meaning.”

— Wallace Stevens

23. “Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.”

— Wallace Stevens

24. “The point of vision and desire are the same.”

— Wallace Stevens

25. “The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

— Wallace Stevens

26. “Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.”

— Wallace Stevens

27. “The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.”

— Wallace Stevens

28. “Disillusion is the last illusion.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

30. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

31. “God is in me or else is not at all.”

— Wallace Stevens

32. “Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.”

— Wallace Stevens

33. “The fire burns as the novel taught it how.”

— Wallace Stevens

34. “Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

36. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

37. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

38. “How red the rose that is the soldier.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

40. “It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

— Wallace Stevens

41. “You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.”

— Wallace Stevens

42. “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.”

— Wallace Stevens

43. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

44. “Realism is a corruption of reality.”

— Wallace Stevens

45. “Make the visible a little hard to see.”

— Wallace Stevens

46. “All poetry is experimental poetry.”

— Wallace Stevens

47. “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words.”

— Wallace Stevens

48. “All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.”

— Wallace Stevens

49. “Man is an eternal sophomore.”

— Wallace Stevens

50. “It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.”

— Wallace Stevens