Wallace Stevens

"The absence of imagination had itself to be imagined."

"Life's nobility is all bound up in the fact that life is difficult."

"To live in the world is to live among meanings."

"The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness."

"Art must contain a truth we cannot otherwise know."

"There is a nature within us that cannot be denied."

"The pressure of reality constantly affects our imagination."

"One cannot be concerned with the manner of execution."

"The eye's plain version is a thing apart from the composer's legendary past."

"We must accept that we ourselves are fragments in an unknown composition."

"The social form is a kind of paradise."

"Words are composed of syllables, syllables of sounds, and sounds of silence."

"The poet is the creature of light and dream."

"Order is not something imposed on chaos; it emerges from within."

"To perceive is to live in a state of perpetual revolution."

"The real is not a matter of fact but a matter of choice."

"Imagination extends only so far as we can think."

"The spirit of man is the expression of the powers of the mind."

"A man is a god in ruins."

"The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully."

"We seek the poems that stir the depths within us."

"The search for reality is as momentous as the search for God."

"One writes poetry for the ear and the heart, not the mind."

"Society is always, at all moments, dead when contemplated."

"The greatest truth may be that which we have not yet imagined."

"In the end, the mind composes what the eye has already seen."

"Beauty is the achievement of a successful form."

"The world as we know it is our own construction."

"We must be constantly aware that the world is changing."

"The struggle of the ego with the cosmos defines existence."