The collection / 17 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

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

Archibald MacLeish / quote

02Undated

And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night

Archibald MacLeish / quote

03Undated

A poem should not meanBut be.

Archibald MacLeish / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex

Archibald MacLeish / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

We knock upon silence for an answering music.

Archibald MacLeish / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

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

Archibald MacLeish / quote

12Undated

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

Archibald MacLeish / quote

13Undated

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 / quote

14Undated

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

Archibald MacLeish / quote

15Undated

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 / quote

16Undated

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

Archibald MacLeish / quote

17Undated

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

Archibald MacLeish / quote