Archibald MacLeish quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Archibald MacLeish on Wise Famous Quotes.

We knock upon silence for an answering music.

The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.

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

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river.

Writers ... write to give reality to experience.

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.

If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.

A poem should not mean
But be.

Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any ... there is only love. - J.B's wife

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

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.

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

Poets ... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt -
an image of the world in which men can again believe.

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!

The only thing about a man that is a man ... is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.

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

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.

What once was cuddled must learn to kiss, The cold worm's mouth. That's all the mystery.

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

Around, around the sun we go:
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.

We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.