15 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Mind

Wallace Stevens quotes on mind

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.

43. One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

92. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire.

106. Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.

115. Apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes, Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object of The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind...

136. There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony

142. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

155. We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

160. The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night's pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.

172. You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That's it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

185. The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives - if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary . . . What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...

189. The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

191. The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

194. At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

200. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing