Wallace Stevens People Quotations

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

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.