Archibald Macleish Quotes

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

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

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

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

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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 ~ Archibald MacLeish

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. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

Lloyd George is a one-eyed fellow in blinkers. ~ Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl Of Rosebery

You must learn to accept that humans make mistakes, but when the same issue is repeated over and over without corrective strategies to plug the holes, then you must expect negative impact on your definition of success. It is normal to make a mistake, but learn, face the consequences, get back up and march on. If you want to be different or stand out as a brand, then your actions, habits, behaviours and decisions must reflect that 'you care about what people think or say about you. ~ Archibald Marwizi

If challenges within this Global Economic sphere are not addressed, we risk having the same populace that celebrated the collapse of communism, or their future generations, rising up to demand that we go back to communistic approaches to the economy. Rising national debt of global powers, the growing gap between the rich and poor and the ripple effects of related threats, remain a challenge for the global economy. Will you be one of the leaders who have a unique mission with part of the illusive answers? Will you help more people rise to a better educational and economic status? ~ Archibald Marwizi

Just because you cannot see it now, does not mean it is not there or not possible. See yourself succeeding and own that vision through all your planning and hard work. ~ Archibald Marwizi

He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge - where it is written and where it is to be found. ~ Archibald Alexander Hodge

You should remember that though another may have more money, beauty, and brains than you, when it comes to the rarer spiritual values such as charity, self-sacrifice, honor, nobility of heart, you have an equal chance with everyone to be the most beloved and honored of all people. ~ Archibald Rutledge

The obvious signs of a brand gone wrong are the levels of negative headlines it consistently attracts. People talking about you for all the negative and wrong reasons. You begin to shoot yourself in the foot and you have become your own enemy. The gospel about you should be good enough to create relevance and significance - or rather to confirm that. ~ Archibald Marwizi

There is no man who has not some interesting associations with particular scenes, or airs, or books, and who does not feel their beauty or sublimity enhanced to him by such connections. ~ Sir Archibald Alison, 2nd Baronet

I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times ~ John Archibald Wheeler

Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses ... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon. ~ Archibald Cox

I am aware that for decades there has been exploration of options and concrete plans and investments being made to look at life on another planet. We must not stop exploring. At the same time let's preserve and enhance the life we already have on earth. Join the green revolution, plant trees, stop soil erosion, reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere and promote recycling of waste. Become aware, create awareness, act responsibly and lead by example. ~ Archibald Marwizi

The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has withstood so much bad preaching! ~ Archibald Thomas Robertson

I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher trying to understand. If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day. ~ John Archibald Wheeler

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality. ~ John Archibald Wheeler

How marvelous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men's hands; cemented with men's honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human
for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine. ~ Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl Of Rosebery

Do not lose focus because of small wins or temporary set-backs. You can only score if you keep your eyes on the ball and be certain of where you want to place it even if you are not in physical sight of the goal. Visualise the dream but never take your eyes off the dynamic plan of action. ~ Archibald Marwizi

The turkey's eyes are such that he can see a bumblebee turn a somersault on the verge of the horizon. ~ Archibald Rutledge

What are the beliefs that give life, spirit and passion to your dream and which values will guide your decisions and actions for you to be fulfilled by your own success? ~ Archibald Marwizi

It is said, and it is true, that just before we are born, a cavern angel puts his finger to our lips and says, "Hush, don't tell what you know." This is why we are born with a cleft on our upper lips and remembering nothing of where we came from". ~ Roderick MacLeish

The key to leadership remains influence. What kind of a leader are you and how do you deliberately model your leadership to achieve desired impact on those you influence or you seek to influence? ~ Archibald Marwizi

To succeed, with or without money, have deliberate plans to make success out of opportunity. If you are totally dependent on chance, then chances are that you will fail. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Your personal development is your personal responsibility. No one can study or acquire knowledge for you. There are things only you can do, to bring the change or the results you require to make progress in life. ~ Archibald Marwizi

To become successful, do the little extra things that ordinary people refuse to do. The little extra hard work, little extra practice, little extra studying and the little extra positive attitude. ~ Archibald Marwizi

It is as natural and reasonable for a dependent creature to apply to its Creator for what it needs, as for a child thus to solicit the aid of a parent who is believed to have the disposition and ability to bestow what it needs. ~ Archibald Alexander

Plan for the sustainability of your success so that you do not drift back to failure and mediocrity. ~ Archibald Marwizi

The challenge therefore, as you strive for success, is to make it a habit to live your life on purpose. You must learn to make deliberate plans and then practice the art and science of doing things on purpose. ~ Archibald Marwizi

My personal convictions drive me to join those like-minded, in the recruitment of a growing army without guns, no hatred or prejudice, but with a leadership voice of influence and harnessing resources to create the change they desire. The major problems facing the world, particularly our beloved African continent, will not be won by sanctions, cruelty, ethnic cleansing, revenge, guns or bullets. The challenges are not largely externally motivated, so the platform to change them must shift. Shift from selfish to selfless, from external to internal, from behaviours to beliefs. Some of them are externally sponsored but self-inflicted, whilst most of them are due to greed, short-sightedness, abuse and selfishness. ~ Archibald Marwizi

As human voice and instrument blend in one harmony, as human soul and body blend in each act of feeling, thought, or speech, so, as far as we can know, divinity and humanity act together in the thought and heart and act of the one Christ. ~ Archibald Alexander Hodge

Knowledge only progresses by making mistakes as fast as possible. ~ John Archibald Wheeler

Have you positioned yourself to be reachable and accessible by those you seek to serve and make an impact on? Do they know where and how to find you, either physically or in the cyber realm? If they cannot reach you for whatever reason, then you have not done your homework, because you are supposed to have a strategy to reach them before they can even look for you! Otherwise someone else will meet them along the way as they look for you. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Don't be intimidated and at the same time don't intimidate. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Whilst you can be a stepping stone to help others succeed, you are not a dirty mat to be abused by others. ~ Archibald Marwizi