Wallace Stevens

"The day of the sun is like the day of a king."

"What we believe is not necessarily what we think."

"Nothing can be said that has not been said before."

"The poet's role is to help people live their lives."

"This seems to suggest that it is not the world that we learn but the extent of our knowledge."

"The artist gives the world new eyes."

"The fiction that results from feeling is as much a fact as anything that can be demonstrated."

"The visible world becomes invisible in its transformation into thought."

"Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully."

"The mind of man is always in confusion; we cannot think of one thing without thinking of another."

"We do not listen to beauty easily because we are enslaved by habit."

"One can live or act or know, but cannot do all three together."

"There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't."

"The way of understanding is an intellectual thing."

"To speak of war when there is no war is to create a kind of war."

"The relation of art to life remains always uncertain."

"Each day brings new light to the same problems."

"The theory of poetry is the life of poetry."

"To live in the world but not of it is the calling of the poetic mind."

"The spirit is the imagination."

"Nothing is given to man on earth, everything is sold."

"We must accept reality and then transcend it with the imagination."

"The life of the imagination may be above life itself."

"To be nothing is to know what one is."

"The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself."

"When we say a man is a poet we mean that he sees further than others."

"The blue guitar claps its true form."

"In the thinking of the body the intelligence is the body."

"If one is a metaphysician one tries to accomplish the purpose of metaphysics."

"The poet must be free from purpose."