32 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Life

Wallace Stevens quotes on life

5. To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense - and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) - but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

12. Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

18. Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.

31. 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. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral.

33. After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

44. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

45. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

46. Death is the mother of beauty

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

48. That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

49. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

64. So that's life, then: things are they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing, And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? And that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar.

78. Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?

81. What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?

94. Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is. There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.

99. Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

101. The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spire of blazoned days.

105. Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.

134. An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo's twang.

137. Eye without lid, mind without any dream - These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end.

147. The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation is The freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentation Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

162. He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

166. There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

169. A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

184. The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

187. The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

188. What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

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.

206. A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

209. Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

213. The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.

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

216. The world is a force not a presence.