Wallace Stevens Quotes

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.

The moment of change is the only poem.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

So much inspires me. People living their lives with courage, beauty of all kinds, nature in all its aspects, people I love and people I hardly know, and, of course, other poets.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.

I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.

I can't imagine a world without music.

The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.

The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

What a picture of a better world you have given us, Mozart!

i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.

Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.

There's nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose Upon Truths lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.