388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

The imagination is man’s power over nature.

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.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, has any chance to mate his life with life.

For the listener, who listens in the snow. And nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Poetry is a finicky thing of air that lives uncertainly and not for long, yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.