Robert Penn Warren Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Knowledge #Men #Ends

“Everything seems an echo of something else.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Echoes

“The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#History #World #Damnation

“Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#History #Historical #Littles

“...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Men #Doe #Relation

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Real #Writing #Want

“The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Meaningful #Men #Light

“I longed to know the world's name.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Names #World

“I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Thinking #Engineering #Ideas

“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Devil #Students #Complicated

“The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Writing #Confusion #Fiction

“The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Meaningful #Men #Poetry

“If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Past #Accepting #Burden

“The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Writing #Scratches #Annoying

“Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Happiness #Self #Substance

“If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Happiness #Thinking #Facts

“For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Country #Growing Up #Blood

“Tell me a story of deep delight.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Delight #Stories #Storytelling

“It is a human defect--to try to know one's self by the self of another.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Self #Trying #Defects

“When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Mother #Father #Trying

“In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Spring #Thinking #America

“So little time we live in Time, And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for Eternity.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Time #Practice #May

“What is man but his passion?”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Passion #Men #Enthusiasm

“In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Mean #Writing #Thinking

“History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#History #Melodrama

“I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Pain #Writing #Firsts

“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Self #Poetry #Understanding

“History is all explained by geography.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Geography

“This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Real #Past #Identity

“If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.”
-- Robert Penn Warren

#Real #Goes On #Matter