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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

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
Conception
Essential
Essentials
Perception
Conceptions
Perceptions
Artificial

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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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.
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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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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.
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
Wallace Stevens
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
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The word is the making of the world
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The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
Wallace Stevens
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
Wallace Stevens
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It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
Wallace Stevens