Top 160 Wallace Stevens Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”

— Wallace Stevens

52. “The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.”

— Wallace Stevens

53. “It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

55. “A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.”

— Wallace Stevens

56. “We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.”

— Wallace Stevens

57. “The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

— Wallace Stevens

58. “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.”

— Wallace Stevens

59. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

60. “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

61. “It is never the thing but the version of the thing.”

— Wallace Stevens

62. “Words of the world are the life of the world.”

— Wallace Stevens

63. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

64. “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

— Wallace Stevens

65. “Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

— Wallace Stevens

66. “To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.”

— Wallace Stevens

67. “Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

— Wallace Stevens

68. “The mind is smaller than the eye.”

— Wallace Stevens

69. “It is the belief and not the god that counts.”

— Wallace Stevens

70. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

71. “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

72. “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

— Wallace Stevens

73. “One’s ignorance is one’s chief asset.”

— Wallace Stevens

74. “One must read poetry with one’s nerves.”

— Wallace Stevens

75. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

76. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

77. “Life is not free from its forms.”

— Wallace Stevens

78. “One must have a mind of winter.”

— Wallace Stevens

79. “Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.”

— Wallace Stevens

80. “It’s a strange courage you give me, ancient star.”

— Wallace Stevens

81. “Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.”

— Wallace Stevens

82. “Success as a result of industry is a peasant’s ideal.”

— Wallace Stevens

83. “True villains are extremely photogenic.”

— Wallace Stevens

84. “The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”

— Wallace Stevens

85. “Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!”

— Wallace Stevens

86. “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

— Wallace Stevens

87. “Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”

— Wallace Stevens

88. “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”

— Wallace Stevens

89. “Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

91. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

92. “It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

95. “We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

— Wallace Stevens

96. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

97. “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...”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

99. “Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.”

— Wallace Stevens

100. “Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?”

— Wallace Stevens