Archibald MacLeish Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have
and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.

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.

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

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.

They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river.

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.

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.

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

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

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

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite - by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity - by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

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

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.

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

Speech to a Crowd

Tell me, my patient friends, awaiters of messages.
From what other shore, from what stranger,
Whence, was the word to come? Who was to lesson you?

Listeners under a child's crib in a manger,
Listeners once by the oracles, now by the transoms,
Whom are you waiting for? Who do you think will explain?

Listeners thousands of years and still no answer -
Writers at night to Miss Lonely-Hearts, awkward spellers,
Open your eyes! There is only earth and the man!

There is only you. There is no one else on the telephone:
No one else is on the air to whisper:
No one else but you will push the bell.

No one knows if you don't: neither ships
Nor landing-fields decode the dark between.
You have your eyes and what your eyes see, is.

The earth you see is really the earth you are seeing.
The sun is truly excellent, truly warm,
Women are beautiful as you have seen them -

Their breasts (believe it) like cooing of doves in a portico.
They bear at their breasts tenderness softly. Look at them!
Look at yourselves. You are strong. You are well formed.

Look at the world - the world you never took!
It is really true you may live in the world heedlessly.
Why do you wait to read it in a book then?

Write it yourselves! Write to yourselves if you need to!
Tell yourselves there is sun and the sun will rise.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be.

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission - his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded - Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer - everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book - it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the g

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.

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.

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

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.

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.