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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Believe
Exquisite
Final
Finals
Fiction
Belief
Else
Truth
Nothing
Willingly

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Wallace Stevens
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Wallace Stevens
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The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.
Wallace Stevens
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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
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Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.
Wallace Stevens
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Wallace Stevens
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens