Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace StevensRead
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Complexity adds depth to life, making it interesting and meaningful.
In this quote, Wallace Stevens suggests that the complexities of life and art are what give them their richness and vibrancy. Without challenges and intricacies, existence would lack the excitement and inspiration that provoke thought and creativity.
Themes
ComplexityLifePoetryMeaningArt
In practice
Example use cases
Discussing the nuances of life during a motivational speech.
More from Wallace Stevens
All quotes →After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace StevensRead
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Wallace StevensRead
LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you.
Wallace StevensRead
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace StevensRead
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Wallace StevensRead
Similar quotes
It's almost as if a demon might have passed from one host to another.
John Forbes Nash, Jr.Read
Morality must keep up with technology because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they'll choose life everytime.
Michael CrichtonRead
All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. The palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
Thomas JeffersonRead
Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
Lord ChesterfieldRead
Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult.
Mark TwainRead
This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.
Julian BarnesRead