Wallace Stevens Quotes on Belief
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Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
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One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
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Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house... It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
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Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
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The death of one god is the death of all.
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The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end.
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
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To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.
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God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).