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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
Deepest
Philosophy
Speak
Cannot
Truth
Live
Men

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish
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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLeish
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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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
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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
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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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
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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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
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
Archibald MacLeish
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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