Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

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.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Money is a kind of poetry.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

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.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.