Stephen Vincent Benet famous quotes

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#War

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 Benet

#Stars #War #Color

I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Youth #Lost #Made

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Tired #Muse #Homesickness

Seine and Piave are silver spoons, But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Spoons #Use #Silver

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. You may bury my body in Sussex grass, You may bury my tongue at Champmedy. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Lying #Heart #Body

God pity us indeed, for we are human,And do not always seeThe vision when it comes, the shining change,Or, if we see it, do not follow it,Because it is too hard, too strange, too new,Too unbelievable, too difficult,Warring too much with common, easy ways,And now I know this, standing in this light,Who have been half alive these many years,Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain,Saying "I am a barren bough. ExpectNor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Pain #Light #Years

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 Benet

#Ideas #Victory #Facts

Books are not men and yet they are alive.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Book #Men #Alive

If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Country #Two #Giving

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 Benet

#Reading #Men #White

I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Names #Fats #Fallen

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Heart #Balance #Tragedy

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 Benet

#Hate #Real #War

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

#Blow #Sky #Sullen

Life was a storm to wander through.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Life #Storm #Wander

Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Men #Hell

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 Benet

#Littles #Priests #Should

Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls,Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars -They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble,Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesyThat something new is coming to the world,The Lord knows what!Well, it's a long time coming,And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Stars #War #Long

Something begins, begins;Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroadIn flesh and spirit and fire.Something is loosed to change the shaken world.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Fire #World #Flesh

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 Benet

#Trust #Kings #Dust

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 Benet

#Memories #Book #Learning

Dreaming men are haunted men.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Love #Dream #Men

Life is not lost -dying; life is lost minute -minute, day -dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Life #Time #Dying

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 Benet

#America #Speech #Faces

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 Benet

#Years #Brotherhood #Deeds

The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Art #Garden #Feet

Broad-streeted Richmond . . . The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Names #People #Tree

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Heart #Knees #Wounded Knee

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 Benet

#Art #Strong #Men

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 Benet

#Knowledge #Winter #Thinking

I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#War #Names #Medicine

Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Children #Father #Men

Grant us a common faith that we shall know bread and peace-that we shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do our best not only in our own lands, but throughout the world. And in that faith let us march toward the clean world our hands can make.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Faith #Opportunity #Hands

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Wisdom #Done

When Daniel Boone goes by at night The phantom deer arise And all lost, wild America Is burning in their eyes.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Eye #Night #America

You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you'd better.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Thinking #Interesting #Gentleman

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 Benet

#Block #Sleep #Tired

As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Luck #Calling #England

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet

#Honesty #Men #Self