Archibald MacLeish Quotes

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 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.

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

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

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

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.

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

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

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

Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

As things are now going the peace we make, what 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.

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

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

There are those, I know, 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

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

To see the earth as we now see it, small 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 unending night ~ brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

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

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

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A poem should not mean but be.