Top 15 Wallace Stevens Quotes

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

The imperfect is our paradise.

The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

I am what is around me.