Wallace Stevens Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

2. I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

3. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

4. A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

5. A poem is a meteor.

6. A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.These two things are one.

7. After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination,Inanimate in an inert savoir. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

8. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

9. I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

10. Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Harmonium

11. One must read poetry with one's nerves.

12. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

13. Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

14. Poetry is the scholar's art.

15. The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

16. 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. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

17. The House Was Quiet and the World Was CalmThe house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there. Transport to Summer

18. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. The Collected Poems

19. The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully. The Collected Poems

20. The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.

21. The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

22. There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.

23. We live in an old chaos of the sun.