Stephen Vincent Benet

Poet

1898-07-22

Quotes by Stephen Vincent Benet

• Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.

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• It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.

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• 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.

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• Books are not men and yet they are alive.

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• Some men wish evil and accomplish it But most men, when they work in that machine, Just let it happen somewhere in the wheels. The fault is no decisive, villainous knife But the dull saw that is the routine mind.

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• 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.

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• We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

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• One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

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• 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.

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

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