Wallace Stevens Quotes

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

The world is not outside you.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

The big show is inside my head.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

Your world will follow your idea about yourself.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that, you have lost everything.

No one can see your life the way you see it.

This world is not the same to all people. Each one lives in his little domain....Peace and harmony may reign in one person's world; where strife and restlessness in anothers. But whatever the circumstances of one's environment, it consists of both an inner and an outer world. The outside world is the one in which your life engages in action and interaction. The world inside of you determines your happiness or unhappiness.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.

As you are, so is the world.

The private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person you that you were. You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.

Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

I paint my own reality.

I create my own reality. And I'm not the only one. My reality is becoming more prominent.