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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
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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
World
Discover
Tasks
Terms
Beauty
Term
Human
Comprehension
Humans
Worlds
Men
Task
More quotes by Archibald MacLeish
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
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
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
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
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
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
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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
If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
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
Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
Archibald MacLeish
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
Archibald MacLeish
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
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
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
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
