Stephen Vincent Benet
Dreaming men are haunted men.Collection: Dreams
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth.Collection: Truth
Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat.
You work hard, and you'll rise. But, if you've got any foolish notions, just knock them on the head and forget them.
You call my candidate a horse thief, and I call yours a lunatic, and we both of us know it's just till election day. It's an American custom, like eating corn on the cob. And, afterwards, we settle down quite peaceably and agree we've got a pretty good country - until next election.
We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.
A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning antracite - that was Dan'l Webster in his prime.
Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.
Treat a boy like a fool and he'll act like a fool, I say, but there's some folks need convincing.
You can't depend on the kind of folks people think they are - you've got to go by what they do. And I wouldn't give much for a man that some folks hadn't thought was a fool, in his time.
We can no longer take our own way of life for granted - we know that it may be challenged. And we know this, too - and know it ever more deeply - we know that freedom and democracy are not just big words mouthed by orators but the rain and the wind and the sun, the air and the light by which we breathe and live.
We cannot be a house divided - divided in will, divided in interest, divided in soul. We cannot be a house divided and live.
It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.
Let us be bold enough and free enough to follow the great examples - the men of good will and honor who put aside little ways and petty hatreds to build the American dream.
Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.'
You can't do business with a man who doesn't know the meaning of a contract. You can't do business with a firm who swears they'll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can't do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas.
It is forbidden to go east, but I have gone, forbidden to go on the great river, but I am there. Open your hearts, you spirits, and hear my song.
Trouble with women. Can't do any art and be married if you're in love with your wife.
There are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.
Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost, Minute by minute, day by dragging day, In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways...Collection: Life
Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.Collection: Stars
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.Collection: Heart
Life was a storm to wander through.Collection: Life
We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.Collection: Hate
Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.Collection: America
Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.Collection: Might
Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.Collection: Memories
Broad-streeted Richmond . . . The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.Collection: Names
Money is sullen And wisdom is sly, But youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why.Collection: Blow
I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.Collection: Reading
Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory.Collection: Ideas
Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years - a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds.Collection: Years
One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.Collection: Heart
When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.Collection: Writing
Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.Collection: Technology
I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in.Collection: Giving
Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.Collection: Trying
Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.Collection: Interesting
God pity us indeed, for we are human, And do not always see, The vision when it comes, the shining change, Or, if we see it, do not follow it, Because it is too hard, too strange, too new, Too unbelievable, too difficult, Warring too much with common, easy ways, And now I know this, standing in this light, Who have been half alive these many years, Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain, Saying "I am a barren bough. Expect, Nor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough."Collection: Pain
Basically when I'm walking I'm not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold.Collection: Writing
Something begins, begins; Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroad, In flesh and spirit and fire. Something is loosed to change the shaken world.Collection: Fire
As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.Collection: Luck
Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, The best yuh ever poured yuh, But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, For Hell's broke loose in Georgia.Collection: Shoes
When Daniel Boone goes by at night The phantom deer arise And all lost, wild America Is burning in their eyes.Collection: Eye
Books are not men and yet they are alive.Collection: Book