Wallace Stevens Quotes

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Wise thinkers prevail everywhere.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

I'm not that smart. I work very hard.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

He who wars, walks in a mist, through which the keenest eyes cannot always discern the right path.

Intelligence always carries uncertainties. That is the nature of the beast.

I like characters who have two different things going on, whether it is Robin from 'Top Of The Lake' having that strength juxtaposed with the vulnerability and being in pain, or whether it is Peggy from 'Mad Men' with her naivety and her sort of idiocy at times, combined with her intelligence and courage really to do what she did at that time.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

Making a film confusing does not make it intelligent.

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.

What went wrong? Nothing and everything.

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

Some wits, too, like oracles, deal in ambiguities, but not with equal success; for though ambiguities are the first excellence of an imposter, they are the last of a wit.

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

Intelligence complicates. Wisdom simplifies.

As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

"If we had not created a set of people against another the world would have been corrupt", and "against" here means two things: Against in the fact that they are challenging you with their diversity, challenging your intelligence and to challenge is not negative, it can be very positive depending on how you are challenged.