Quote

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

Wallace Stevens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Doe
Infused
Mean
Hoard
Liberality
Adapted
Benefits
Ought
Society
Culture
Leaven

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
Image
And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
Image
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
Image
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
Image
We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
Wallace Stevens
Image
What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
Wallace Stevens
Image
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
Image
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens