Quote

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

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
Life
Realize
Realizing
Imagination
Part
Live
Artifice
Mind
Metaphysics
Think
Extent
Thinking
Regard

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 only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
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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.
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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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.
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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
Wallace Stevens
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens