Top 73 Archibald Macleish Quotes
#1. If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
Archibald MacLeish
#2. To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.
Archibald MacLeish
#3. The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
Archibald MacLeish
#4. We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.
Archibald MacLeish
#5. At Ghent the wind rose.
There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag
Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows
Over fresh water when the waves lag
Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain ...
Archibald MacLeish
#7. Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.
Archibald MacLeish
#8. Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
Archibald MacLeish
#9. The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLeish
#10. And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
Archibald MacLeish
#11. The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
Archibald MacLeish
#12. Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.
Archibald MacLeish
#15. We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
Archibald MacLeish
#16. You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
#17. When one expects to go on "forever" as one does in one's youth or even middle age, horizons are merely limits, not yet ends. It is when one first sees the horizon as an end that one first begins to see.
Archibald MacLeish
#18. Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
Archibald MacLeish
#19. To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways ... (The Rape Of The Swan)
Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.
Archibald MacLeish
#21. What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
#22. The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish
#23. See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
#25. You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any ... there is only love. - J.B's wife
Archibald MacLeish
#26. If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.
Archibald MacLeish
#27. Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
Archibald MacLeish
#28. History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
#29. There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.
Archibald MacLeish
#30. The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
#31. Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
#32. Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
Archibald MacLeish
#33. The only thing about a man that is a man ... is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.
Archibald MacLeish
#34. Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.
Archibald MacLeish
#35. To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
Archibald MacLeish
#36. The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
Archibald MacLeish
#37. What once was cuddled must learn to kiss, The cold worm's mouth. That's all the mystery.
Archibald MacLeish
#38. What is more important to a library than anything else
than everything else
is the fact that it exists.
[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]
Archibald MacLeish
#39. It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
Archibald MacLeish
#40. The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
#41. A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard
by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Archibald MacLeish
#42. A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
Archibald MacLeish
#43. The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
Archibald MacLeish
#45. We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
Archibald MacLeish
#46. The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!
Archibald MacLeish
#47. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
Archibald MacLeish
#48. What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
Archibald MacLeish
#51. America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Archibald MacLeish
#52. As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief ... without moral purpose or human interest.
Archibald MacLeish
#53. There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
Archibald MacLeish
#54. There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
#55. There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
Archibald MacLeish
#56. The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
#57. Around, around the sun we go:
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.
Archibald MacLeish
#58. How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.
Archibald MacLeish
#59. Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
Archibald MacLeish
#60. What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science - information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won't.
Archibald MacLeish
#61. If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
#62. Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt -
an image of the world in which men can again believe.
Archibald MacLeish
#63. Poets ... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
#64. That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
Archibald MacLeish
#66. Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.
Archibald MacLeish
#67. Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
#68. If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.
Archibald MacLeish
#69. What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
Archibald MacLeish
#70. Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful.
Archibald MacLeish
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