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
Life
Worse
World
Atheism
Lived
Whatever
May
Absurdity
Ideas
Absurd
Better
Opposite
Men
Opposites

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

Image
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
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
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
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
Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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
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 is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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
Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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
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
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
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
Image
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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