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 MacLeishConventional 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.
Archibald MacLeishWe have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.
Archibald MacLeishWhat 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 oppositeโby profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosityโby dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.
Archibald MacLeish