9 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Belief

Wallace Stevens quotes on belief

9. 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.

34. One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.

35. 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.

70. Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

93. The death of one god is the death of all.

97. 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.

202. After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

203. 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.

215. God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).