Wallace Stevens quote: "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."

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird...
WALLACE STEVENS

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
WALLACE STEVENS

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
WALLACE STEVENS

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our d...
WALLACE STEVENS

The imagination is man's power over nature.
WALLACE STEVENS

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade thro...
WALLACE STEVENS

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to l...
WALLACE STEVENS

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

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
WALLACE STEVENS

Money is a kind of poetry.
WALLACE STEVENS

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
WALLACE STEVENS

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
WALLACE STEVENS

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intoleran...
WALLACE STEVENS

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
WALLACE STEVENS

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
WALLACE STEVENS

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

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

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
An...
WALLACE STEVENS

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
WALLACE STEVENS

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a wom...
WALLACE STEVENS

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclo...
WALLACE STEVENS

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as th...
WALLACE STEVENS

Opusculum paedagogicum
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing els...
WALLACE STEVENS

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
WALLACE STEVENS

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state ...
WALLACE STEVENS

The poet is the priest of the invisible.
WALLACE STEVENS

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

How red the rose that is the soldier
WALLACE STEVENS

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

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, ...
WALLACE STEVENS

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

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

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
WALLACE STEVENS

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. ...
WALLACE STEVENS

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing...
WALLACE STEVENS

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
WALLACE STEVENS

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

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their compla...
WALLACE STEVENS

The imagination is man's power over nature.
WALLACE STEVENS

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget ...
WALLACE STEVENS

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the thr...
WALLACE STEVENS

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
WALLACE STEVENS

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

Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves t...
WALLACE STEVENS

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. Th...
WALLACE STEVENS

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, poli...
WALLACE STEVENS

The genuine artist is never true to life. He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of ...
WALLACE STEVENS

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosu...
WALLACE STEVENS

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
WALLACE STEVENS

If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words...
WALLACE STEVENS

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which...
WALLACE STEVENS

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
WALLACE STEVENS

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
WALLACE STEVENS

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

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as pa...
WALLACE STEVENS

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
WALLACE STEVENS

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-...
WALLACE STEVENS

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unre...
WALLACE STEVENS

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
WALLACE STEVENS

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the America...
WALLACE STEVENS

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
WALLACE STEVENS

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance r...
WALLACE STEVENS

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family an...
WALLACE STEVENS

The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Fl...
WALLACE STEVENS

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

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in t...
WALLACE STEVENS

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.
WALLACE STEVENS

Just as my fingers on the keys / Make music, so the selfsame sounds / On my spirit make a music, too...
WALLACE STEVENS

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman
WALLACE STEVENS

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
WALLACE STEVENS

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to l...
WALLACE STEVENS

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird...
WALLACE STEVENS

The poet is the priest of the invisible
WALLACE STEVENS

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our d...
WALLACE STEVENS

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is no...
WALLACE STEVENS

The genuine artist is never ''true to life'.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware...
WALLACE STEVENS

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing...
WALLACE STEVENS

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

It's so fucking controlled. Poetry must not become a hospital.
WALLACE STEVENS

All history is modern history
WALLACE STEVENS

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in...
WALLACE STEVENS

They said, "You have a blue guitar,/ You do not play things as they are."/ The man replied, "Things ...
WALLACE STEVENS

Beauty is momentary in the mind / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal....
WALLACE STEVENS

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
WALLACE STEVENS

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something mor...
WALLACE STEVENS

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

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

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackb...
WALLACE STEVENS

A poem is a meteor.
WALLACE STEVENS

I see myself capable of arrogance and brutality... That's a fierce thing, to discover within you...
GEORGE STEVENS

I am not opposed to intelligence reform on its face, but any changes should reflect the current cont...
TED STEVENS

What we have, however, is an issue that has tremendous impact here at home, and we believe that Amer...
TED STEVENS

I am guilty of asking the Senate for pork and proud of the Senate for giving it to me.
TED STEVENS

I do have concerns about the current efforts to restructure our nation's intelligence community.
TED STEVENS

There are not as many women who support the national defense budget now as men. I really think there...
TED STEVENS

People who vote against this today are voting against me and I will not forget.
TED STEVENS

I rise today to discuss the National Intelligence Reform bill. I commend my colleagues in both House...
TED STEVENS

I was in the Boy Scouts for about four years until my troop disbanded. It is really one of the best ...
TED STEVENS

In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything. I think that's kind of natura...
CAT STEVENS

I'm not normally the kind of person who holds on to grudges, I'm really not.
RACHEL STEVENS

I wanted to do an episode about Chuck having a gambling problem. I wanted to portray my addiction on...
FISHER STEVENS

Oh. Yes. There. Is. A. Lot of pressure. As a solo singer. Absolutely.
RACHEL STEVENS

My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz.
RACHEL STEVENS

I'm so programmed to getting up early that I like to make the most of the day.
RACHEL STEVENS

Feeling comfortable in my own skin has never been easy for me.
RACHEL STEVENS

I never felt popular as a child and never had best friends.
RACHEL STEVENS

I really do feel now that the way I dress onstage and for work is a true reflection of my own sense ...
RACHEL STEVENS

I think it's certainly natural to try new things as you grow up and get older!
RACHEL STEVENS

I'd love to break America, like all artists do. It's a lot of work but, you know, it's g...
RACHEL STEVENS

In S Club I played a role in a band, but now I can go off and be me - My horizon's wide open now...
RACHEL STEVENS

Songs like Reach and S Club Party are pop classics. I'm really proud that I had a part in them.
RACHEL STEVENS

I would love to work with someone like Kevin Spacey as he could pass on what I need to learn.
RACHEL STEVENS

It's not what you wear it's how you wear it, is what I say.
RACHEL STEVENS

Being able to laugh is sexy in a man or woman.
RACHEL STEVENS

I'd rather stay out of the limelight until I've done something I feel proud of.
RACHEL STEVENS

I never really hated any particular sport but out of all the sports, I used to prefer the team games...
RACHEL STEVENS

When people recognise me they just kind of go 'Hi how are you,' really kind of cool you know...
RACHEL STEVENS

I'm a cereal girl. I have always loved my cereal ever since I was a kid.
RACHEL STEVENS

I can be very passionate but I also have a bit of a hot temper - when pushed.
RACHEL STEVENS

I am really passionate about my career and my music and I am so lucky to be able to do what I do for...
RACHEL STEVENS

A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age, feeling unpopul...
RACHEL STEVENS

Be true to yourself and go with your instincts - don't be somebody you're not just to fit in...
RACHEL STEVENS

I know it sounds a bit corny, but I do think that beauty and sexiness come from within.
RACHEL STEVENS

Having a bad haircut can be quite traumatic!
RACHEL STEVENS

The problem with national gardening magazines and TV shows is that they're based on the East Coast, ...
ALAN STEVENS

I think more people should plant more flowers in more places, to make the world a more colorful plac...
ALAN STEVENS

It's something to see when I drive through town everyday. I think we all need to give something to t...
ALAN STEVENS

The government has asked that he be detained because he is either a flight risk or a danger to the c...
ALAN STEVENS

The reason I took Early Edition - besides the fact that I liked it - was that it enabled me to start...
FISHER STEVENS

I used to be more of a wild kid. But I've slowed down.
FISHER STEVENS

And TV is not the easiest place to be dangerous or on the edge. Especially on a Saturday night.
FISHER STEVENS

Unfortunately, the public might not know that we get a script usually two days before shooting. So s...
FISHER STEVENS

But basically what I like are the possibilities, and the fantasy element of the show. Not science fa...
FISHER STEVENS

I use that as my responsibility on the show, to be the pragmatist.
FISHER STEVENS

But I'm trying to play into this role as much as possible and be a nicer person in real life.
FISHER STEVENS

Well, I just wanted to be a person. I just wanted them to keep writing me as humanistic as possible.
FISHER STEVENS

It got a little boring I guess, playing the same note over and over.
FISHER STEVENS

But did I think it would last more than 13 episodes at the time? No, I didn't think that. I neve...
FISHER STEVENS

I'm really obsessed with the past.
FISHER STEVENS

No, but I'm really lucky, because I'm not the superhero.
FISHER STEVENS

I like people and get along, and I'm afraid to express my anger and my rage.
FISHER STEVENS

You know, it's a very sexist society, Indonesia.
FISHER STEVENS

But I used to have a bit of a gambling problem. And that would have been the answer to my prayers. I...
FISHER STEVENS

But I like being nasty. I like being cranky. Especially if it's a cold day in Chicago, it's ...
FISHER STEVENS

Strip the proud nobility of their bloated estates, reduce them to a level with plain republicans, se...
THADDEUS STEVENS

The less you know, the more you think you know, because you don't know you don't know.
RAY STEVENS

Peace Train is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hea...
CAT STEVENS

It was important for me to duck out of the fast and furious life I'd been living as a pop star. I wa...
CAT STEVENS

In those days a concert was a personal experience. I wanted to be as close as possible to the audien...
CAT STEVENS

If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million ways...
CAT STEVENS

I've studied various schools of thought... I acknowledge that some Muslims consider music prohibited...
CAT STEVENS

I looked at some of the statues of Jesus; they were just stones with no life. When they said that Go...
CAT STEVENS

I did not come into contact with any Muslim before I embraced Islam. I read the Qur'an first and rea...
CAT STEVENS

Communal well-being is central to human life.
CAT STEVENS

If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million ways...
CAT STEVENS

I don't know much about my biological background.
DAN STEVENS

I'm lucky to be married to someone who entirely gets what I do. She is totally sympathetic to th...
DAN STEVENS

I never quite toed the line. I was a bit disruptive. All my early school reports from the age of 5 w...
DAN STEVENS

It's head and heart. I like to feed both. I always wanted to be an actor. But the cultural-intel...
DAN STEVENS

I'm shocked at being recognized. You go to places you don't think you would be and still, yo...
DAN STEVENS

The Broadway audiences are very vocal and seem very engaged. For certain shows, especially with a sh...
DAN STEVENS

Everything's so accelerated now.
DAN STEVENS

The female attention I have to struggle hardest with is from my two-year-old daughter.
DAN STEVENS

I'm shocked at being recognized.
DAN STEVENS

Not a lot of people would think that I spent most of my early years totally rebelling against anythi...
DAN STEVENS

I'm amazed by just constantly - there's not a week that goes past where there's not some...
DAN STEVENS

At the age of 11 I was about 6 ft. tall and my voice had completely broken. That caused problems. I ...
DAN STEVENS

I don't see money or a particular status as an actor as a goal, but I want to do the best work I...
DAN STEVENS

I've had to learn when not to tweet. Like, you learn how to keep your mouth shut? Learn to keep ...
DAN STEVENS

As long as I am given the opportunity to keep performing and keep exploring in whatever medium, I...
DAN STEVENS

I haven't done as many films as I would have liked. A lot of my contemporaries have done more. I...
DAN STEVENS

In the 21st century, I think it's fair to say, homosexuality is more accepted in Britain and it&...
DAN STEVENS

Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have. People wa...
DAN STEVENS

My dad tells me that he took us to a pantomime when I was very, very small - panto being a sort of E...
DAN STEVENS

We take so many of our freedoms for granted nowadays - I can travel where I like, I can have a baby ...
DAN STEVENS

I saw Mercury Prize-winners Alt-J for the first time recently, touring their debut album 'An Awe...
DAN STEVENS

All my early school reports from the age of 5 were 'Daniel must learn not to distract others....
DAN STEVENS

Music is a lady that I still love because she gives me the air that I breathe. We need all sorts of ...
CAT STEVENS

I found a religion that blended scientific reason with spiritual reality in a unifying faith far rem...
CAT STEVENS

Politeness is the art of choosing among one's real thoughts.
ABEL STEVENS

If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million way...
CAT STEVENS

Destiny is for people who are too lazy to create alternate timelines.
R. STEVENS

Pride is a powerful narcotic, but it doesn't do much for the auto-immune system.
STUART STEVENS

I've never tried to find my real parents. I'm very grateful to my mum and dad for adopting m...
DAN STEVENS

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset ...
FISHER STEVENS

Everything I do is for the pleasure of Allah.
CAT STEVENS

I think having children is the most amazing thing.
RACHEL STEVENS

I love the live performances and Las Vegas. I also like making films that are being discovered by an...
CONNIE STEVENS

Nothing you wear is more important than your smile.
CONNIE STEVENS

A British porch is a musty, forbidding non-room in which to fling a sodden umbrella or a muddy pair ...
DAN STEVENS

The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity; moving beyond it necessitates intuition, which in...
DAN STEVENS

I was more secure being a mother than I was walking on a set.
CONNIE STEVENS

My kids are pretty secure, bright, and know who they are.
CONNIE STEVENS

I am from Brooklyn, NY, so we could not have many pets, but I always had at least two dogs.
CONNIE STEVENS

I am a New Yorker.
CONNIE STEVENS

I love being Italian.
CONNIE STEVENS

I made the decision a long time ago that I had an obligation to my children that I happily fulfilled...
CONNIE STEVENS

Once you have an animal, you have to commit to it. They need a sense of freedom, but, of course, the...
CONNIE STEVENS

It's important for us to latch onto the people that we love.
CONNIE STEVENS

She will be successful who is easy to start and hard to stop.
CONNIE STEVENS

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.

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Wallace Stevens

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.

Wallace Stevens

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