Archibald MacLeish
25 quotes
Biography
"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"
"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]"
"A poem should not mean But be."
"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. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls."
"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."
"What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God."
"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."
"Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else."
"Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man."
"Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world."
"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."
"What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]"
"What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo."
"What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice."