Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Lived
Whatever
May
Absurdity
Ideas
Absurd
Better
Opposite
Men
Opposites
Life
Worse
World
Atheism

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

Image
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish