Wallace Stevens Quotes

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

I dream, therefore I exist.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

Creating means living.

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

It is with logic that one proves; it is with intuition that one invents.

We express our being by creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being.