Wallace Stevens

“The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”

“The imperfect is our paradise.”

“Death is the mother of beauty.”

“After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.”

“The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”

“Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.”

“It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”

“God and the imagination are one.”

“It is an illusion that we were ever alive, / Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves / By our own motions in a freedom of our own.”

“The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.”

“The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written.”

“The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.”

“Money is a kind of poetry.”