Top 160 Wallace Stevens Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

— Wallace Stevens

152. “Consider the odd morphology of regret.”

— Wallace Stevens

153. “Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.”

— Wallace Stevens

154. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

155. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

156. “Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

158. “There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.”

— Wallace Stevens

159. “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

160. “The imagination is man’s power over nature.”

— Wallace Stevens

161. “One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.”

— Wallace Stevens

162. “The death of one god is the death of all.”

— Wallace Stevens

163. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

164. “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.”

— Wallace Stevens

165. “The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.”

— Wallace Stevens

166. “Thought tends to collect in pools.”

— Wallace Stevens

167. “I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.”

— Wallace Stevens

168. “How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

— Wallace Stevens

169. “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.”

— Wallace Stevens

170. “Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.”

— Wallace Stevens

171. “One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.”

— Wallace Stevens

172. “The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.”

— Wallace Stevens

173. “How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?”

— Wallace Stevens

174. “Youngish artists have a way of being melancholy. It may be that this is merely a symptom of the distress they feel at the absence of definition. They have no very distinct outline either of themselves or of the abstractions that bedevil them. They are, in short, likely to be a bit baffled.”

— Wallace Stevens

175. “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

176. “Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.”

— Wallace Stevens

177. “Her green mind made the world around her green.”

— Wallace Stevens

178. “Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.”

— Wallace Stevens

179. “The mind can never be satisfied.”

— Wallace Stevens