81+ Robert Penn Warren Quotes On Education, World And Purpose

Robert Penn Warren was an American novelist, poet, and literary critic. He was one of the founders of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism that focused on close readings of texts. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947 for his novel All the King's Men. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Penn Warren on education, life, world.

Top 10 Robert Penn Warren Quotes

1. The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
2. 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.
3. Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.
4. Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
5. History is all explained by geography.
6. The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.
7. The past is always a rebuke to the present.
8. 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.
9. The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
10. For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Robert Penn Warren Short Quotes

• What is man but his passion?
• More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
• It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
• Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?
• ...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
• There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.
• A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.
• In separateness only does love learn definition.
• For the truth is a terrible thing.
• Everything seems an echo of something else.

Robert Penn Warren Quotes About Life

A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released. — Robert Penn Warren

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth. — Robert Penn Warren

If a man knew how to live he would never die. — Robert Penn Warren

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow. — Robert Penn Warren

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

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

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. — Robert Penn Warren

For whatever you live is life. — Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Quotes About World

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. — Robert Penn Warren

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm. — Robert Penn Warren

My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical. — Robert Penn Warren

I longed to know the world's name. — Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Quotes About Time

Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight. — Robert Penn Warren

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

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time. — Robert Penn Warren

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time. — Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Quotes About Poem

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. — Robert Penn Warren

For what is a poem, but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding. It is the deepest part of autobiography. — Robert Penn Warren

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

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." — Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Quotes About Writing

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

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

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write. — Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Famous Quotes And Sayings

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future. — Robert Penn Warren

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

Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life. — Robert Penn Warren

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. — Robert Penn Warren

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

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened. — Robert Penn Warren

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. — Robert Penn Warren

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures. — Robert Penn Warren

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it. — Robert Penn Warren

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you. — Robert Penn Warren

Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price. — Robert Penn Warren

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money. — Robert Penn Warren

Tell me a story of deep delight. — Robert Penn Warren

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

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen. — Robert Penn Warren

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

Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this? — Robert Penn Warren

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same. — Robert Penn Warren

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. — Robert Penn Warren

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of. — Robert Penn Warren

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something. — Robert Penn Warren

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it. — Robert Penn Warren

Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds. — Robert Penn Warren

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. — Robert Penn Warren

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? — Robert Penn Warren

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this. — Robert Penn Warren

Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good. — Robert Penn Warren

If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. — Robert Penn Warren

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea. — Robert Penn Warren

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way. — Robert Penn Warren

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

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men) — Robert Penn Warren

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

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

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

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

There is no country but the heart. — Robert Penn Warren

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good. — Robert Penn Warren

Life Lessons by Robert Penn Warren

1. Robert Penn Warren teaches us to be resilient in the face of adversity, to stay true to our values, and to never give up on our dreams.
2. He encourages us to think deeply about our lives, to be aware of our own mortality, and to strive for a greater understanding of the world around us.
3. He reminds us to be kind to others, to appreciate the beauty of nature, and to strive for justice and equality for all.