8 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Humanity

Wallace Stevens quotes on humanity

2. 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.

51. A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

100. The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself, Of her sons and of her daughters.

117. He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart.

133. On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter's death.

168. I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels.

179. If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part.

212. Man is an eternal sophomore.