Quote

What is man but his passion?

Robert Penn Warren

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Enthusiasm
Passion
Men

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Image
You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.
Robert Penn Warren