Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

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

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

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.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.