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Quotes from The Necessary Angel — Wallace Stevens

1879–1955 United States

← All quotes by Wallace Stevens

9 quotes

Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

The Necessary Angel (1951)

For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and ... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things."

The Necessary Angel (1951)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wallace Stevens (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.