Wallace Stevens Quotes

My strength and my weakness is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like.

You can see and you can listen, but you have to have moments in which you feel.

I dream in color, and I have visions of feelings and energies that I would love to feel.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

I lay around and wonder why you were always there for me.

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.

Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.

In the holy solipsism of the young Now I can't walk thru a city street w/out eying each single pedestrian. I feel thier vibe thru my skin, the hair on my neck --- it rises.

When I open my eyes to the outer world I feel myself as a drop in the sea. But when I close my eyes and look within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.

The only reality is the one we have inside us. What makes most people’s lives so artificial and unworthy is that they falsely regard outside images as reality and they never allow their own inner world to speak.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

It is not half so important to know as to feel.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way. Being explicit doesn't tap into the mystical aspect of it either in fact, that usually kills it because people don't want to see sex so much as they want to experience the emotions that go along with it. These things are hard to convey in film because sex is such a mystery.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within.

There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.

Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.

every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

How do I know about the world? By what is within me.