Top 60 Archibald MacLeish Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.”

— Archibald MacLeish

2. “If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.”

— Archibald MacLeish

3. “Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”

— Archibald MacLeish

4. “A poem should not mean but be.”

— Archibald MacLeish

5. “What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.”

— Archibald MacLeish

6. “A world ends when its metaphor has died.”

— Archibald MacLeish

7. “If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.”

— Archibald MacLeish

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Beauty is that Medusa’s head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.”

— Archibald MacLeish

11. “We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.”

— Archibald MacLeish

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.”

— Archibald MacLeish

16. “We knock upon silence for an answering music.”

— Archibald MacLeish

17. “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

18. “Freedom is the right to one’s dignity as a man.”

— Archibald MacLeish

19. “See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.”

— Archibald MacLeish

20. “Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.”

— Archibald MacLeish

21. “Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.”

— Archibald MacLeish

22. “Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.”

— Archibald MacLeish

23. “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.”

— Archibald MacLeish

24. “A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.”

— Archibald MacLeish

25. “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

26. “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

27. “A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.”

— Archibald MacLeish

28. “The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.”

— Archibald MacLeish

29. “History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can’t be heard.”

— Archibald MacLeish

30. “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

31. “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

32. “What once was cuddled must learn to kiss, The cold worm’s mouth. That’s all the mystery.”

— Archibald MacLeish

33. “A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.”

— Archibald MacLeish

34. “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

35. “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

36. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

— Archibald MacLeish

37. “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

38. “We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.”

— Archibald MacLeish

39. “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

40. “Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”

— Archibald MacLeish

41. “Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men’s watch upon the world and on themselves.”

— Archibald MacLeish

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

— Archibald MacLeish

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Archibald MacLeish

45. “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

46. “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

47. “You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.”

— Archibald MacLeish

48. “You wanted justice and there was none- only love.”

— Archibald MacLeish

49. “The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!”

— Archibald MacLeish

50. “The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.”

— Archibald MacLeish