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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
Speak
Cannot
Truth
Live
Men
Deepest
Philosophy
More quotes by 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
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
Archibald MacLeish
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
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
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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
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
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
That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
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
Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
Archibald MacLeish
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
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
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish