Top 50 Stephen Vincent Benét Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is not lost -dying; life is lost minute -minute, day -dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

2. “Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

3. “We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

4. “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you’d better.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

5. “Money is sullen And wisdom is sly, But youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

6. “Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

7. “I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

8. “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

9. “Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

10. “Books are not men and yet they are alive.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

11. “As for what you’re calling hard luck – well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

12. “Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

13. “Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you’re good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

14. “When Daniel Boone goes by at night The phantom deer arise And all lost, wild America Is burning in their eyes.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

15. “Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years – a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

16. “American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

Featured in: Strong Quotes

17. “And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

18. “The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

19. “I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

20. “Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my bufdfalo have found me.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

21. “Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, The best yuh ever poured yuh, But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, For Hell’s broke loose in Georgia.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

22. “It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

23. “I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel’s heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

24. “We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

25. “If two New Hampshiremen aren’t a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

26. “The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day – no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

27. “Remember that when you say “I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,” you have denied America with that word.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

28. “I’ve been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she’d found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

Featured in: Reading Quotes

29. “The other week I wrote a piece on a photograph I got at a flea market, and I got about 70 hits. I think a lot of people must be interested in flea markets.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

30. “Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn’t write about as such.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

31. “I am tired of loving a foreign muse.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

32. “Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

33. “It’s to a younger people’s advantage to work with evolving computer technologies that provide so many ways to explore the use and distribution of text, including sound, images and motion.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

34. “I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

35. “Life was a storm to wander through.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

36. “A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

37. “Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

38. “I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we’re walking in.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

39. “I don’t think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom’s interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work – that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

40. “One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

41. “Even in hell, if a man was a man, you’d know it.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

42. “Basically when I’m walking I’m not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

43. “Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man’s memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

44. “I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

45. “At first I was blogging everyday, but I don’t do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I’ll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it’ll just be new work that I’m doing.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

46. “Most of the time I’m not really attracted to writing that’s focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

47. “Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

48. “Occasionally I encounter people getting into their cars who will say, “Oh, you haven’t been walking lately” – like I’m a symbol of the ancient art of walking!”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

49. “When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét

50. “When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from “A” – particularly sections “22” and “23.” It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.”

— Stephen Vincent Benét