Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace StevensRead
The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the limitations of reason compared to the power of desire.
Wallace Stevens highlights the idea that reason, while important, cannot fulfill human needs or desires in the same way that the pursuit of those desires can. It suggests that the emotional and instinctual drives inherent in human beings outweigh purely logical reasoning, as desire propels us toward deeper fulfillment than reason alone can provide.
Themes
ReasonDesirePhilosophyHuman NatureEmotions
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the role of emotions in decision-making, you might quote this to stress the importance of desire.
More from Wallace Stevens
All quotes βMost modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace StevensRead
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
Similar quotes
Our fates are in the hands of An Almighty God, to whom I can with pleasure confide my own; he can save us, or destroy us; his Councils are fixed and cannot be disappointed, and all his designs will be Accomplished.
Abraham ClarkRead
Whatsoever you can be you are. There is no goal. And we are not going anywhere. We are simply celebrating here. Existence is not a journey, it is a celebration. Think of it as a celebration, as a delight, as a joy! Don't turn it into a suffering, don't turn it into a duty, a work. Let it be play.
RajneeshRead
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
Joseph ConradRead
The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies-local, national, and international-and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others.
Margaret LeviRead
Once upon a time men were possessed by devils. Now they are not less obsessed by ideas
Carl JungRead
No clouds gathered in the skies and the polluted streams became clear, whilst celestial music rang through the air and the angels rejoiced with gladness. With no selfish or partial joy but for the sake of the law they rejoiced, for creation engulfed in the ocean of pain was now to obtain release.
Gautama BuddhaRead