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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Freedom
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.Collection: Experience
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Poetry
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 see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
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.
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
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.
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.
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.
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
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.
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.
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.Collection: Democracy
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.Collection: Determination
The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Beautiful
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Dream
Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.Collection: Moon
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.Collection: Art
We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.Collection: Atheism
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.Collection: Gold
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.Collection: Ignorance
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.Collection: Wind
If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.Collection: Atheism
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.Collection: Freedom
A poem should not mean but be.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Acceptance
Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.Collection: Love Is
A world ends when its metaphor has died.Collection: World
That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.Collection: Ideas
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Mirrors
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.Collection: Morning
Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Reading
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.Collection: Bird
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.Collection: Book
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 offCollection: Real
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.Collection: Peace
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.Collection: Spots