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.
Archibald MacLeishSee the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeishIf the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
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 MacLeishAround, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
Archibald MacLeishWhat 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