20 Quotes & Sayings By Archibald Macleish

Archibald MacLeish (July 1, 1892 – June 5, 1982) was an American poet, playwright, and magazine editor. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1919 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1948; he also received an Academy Award for the screen adaptation of his play J. B. The Poet (1921) Read more

He won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955 for his play J. B. and was nominated for one in 1965 for Lute Song and another in 1970 for The Heiress.

He won the National Book Award posthumously in 1983 for his collected poems, Collected Poems (1983).

Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round...
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Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo. Archibald MacLeish
And here face down beneath the sun And here upon...
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And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night Archibald MacLeish
A poem should not mean But be.
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A poem should not mean But be. Archibald MacLeish
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a...
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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
What is more important to a library than anything else...
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What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972] Archibald MacLeish
What is more important to a library than anything else...
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What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex Archibald MacLeish
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the...
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What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. Archibald MacLeish
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As things are now going, the peace we will make, the 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
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We knock upon silence for an answering music. Archibald MacLeish
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To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways..." (The Rape Of The Swan)Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism. Archibald MacLeish
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When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco.. Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission–his life..Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book.. was ever anything else than a report.. A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence.. it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded– Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer–everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book–it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things." But if this is what a book is.. then a library is an extraordinary thing..The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion.. It asserts that.. all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies..The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city.. decays. The nation loses its grandeur.. The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together.. . Archibald MacLeish
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Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo. Archibald MacLeish
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We have no choice but to be guilty God is unthinkable if we are innocent. Archibald MacLeish
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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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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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There are those 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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What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Archibald MacLeish
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. Archibald MacLeish