Archibald MacLeish Quotes & Sayings

The only thing about a man that is a man ... is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse. — 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

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. — Archibald MacLeish

A world ends when its metaphor has died. — 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

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit. — Archibald MacLeish

To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue 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 eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers. — Archibald MacLeish

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

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

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading. — Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

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. — 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

They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river. — 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

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive. — Archibald MacLeish

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

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

At Ghent the wind rose.
There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag
Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows
Over fresh water when the waves lag
Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain ... — Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. — 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

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

A poem should not mean
But be. — 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

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

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world. — 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 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

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

What is more important to a library than anything else
than everything else
is the fact that it exists.
[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972] — Archibald MacLeish

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. — Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published. — Archibald MacLeish

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

How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream. — 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

We knock upon silence for an answering music. — Archibald MacLeish

The first discipline is the realization that there is a discipline - -that all art begins and ends with discipline, that any art is first and foremost a craft. We have gone far enough on the road to self-indulgence now to know that. The man who announces to the world that he is going to "do his thing" is like the amateur on the high-diving platform who flings himself into the void shouting at the judges that he is going to do whatever comes naturally. He will land on his ass. Naturally. You'd think, to listen to the loudspeakers that surround us, that no man had ever tried to "do his thing" before. Every poet worth reading has, but those really worth reading have understood that to do your thing you have to learn first what your thing is and second how to go about doing it. — 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

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. — Archibald MacLeish

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

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

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

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. — 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

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

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

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

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 MacLeish

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

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer. — Archibald MacLeish

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. — 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

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

Writers ... write to give reality to experience. — Archibald MacLeish

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did. — 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