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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

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
Conform
Expenses
Peculiar
Expectations
Bookish
Atheism
Compels
Disease
Infatuation
Experience
Intellectuals
Ideas
Expense

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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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.
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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.
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Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
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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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.
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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.
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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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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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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish