Top quotes by Robert Bly

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life. Votes: 16

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching. Votes: 14

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness. Votes: 13

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown. Votes: 12

They wrote to me and said something about it, and I said that if it doesn't involve any work, I'll do it. (On being named Minnesota's first Poet Laureate) Votes: 10

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing Votes: 9

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags. Votes: 7

Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens. Votes: 6

But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party. Votes: 6

Don't ask why the elephants wear such large shoes,And why the kangaroos are reborn kidnappers,And why the sailing birds are all Romantics. Votes: 4

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live. Votes: 4

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. Votes: 3

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity. Votes: 3

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy. Votes: 3

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem. Votes: 3

A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn't move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving. Votes: 3

A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this. Votes: 3

Adolescents are in just as much trouble in Native America as they are in the white community. Votes: 3

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards. Votes: 3

Adulthood has something to do with not choosing any of the pure points of view, but living about half of what you really want to live. Votes: 3

And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut? Votes: 3

The human face shines as it speaks of thingsNear itself, thoughts full of dreams.The human face shines like a dark skyAs it speaks of those things that oppress the living Votes: 1

All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing. Votes: 1

All of those on the left, as I am, have always vastly preferred the democratic society over the hierarchical society and still do, but the democratic culture doesn't exist without highly informed citizens capable of thinking well, and if you have schools in which 40 percent of the people coming out of them cannot make change for a dollar, you don't have a democracy. You have a sibling society. Votes: 1

... where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be. Votes: 0

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead. Votes: 0

As a parent you have to do some renunciation. Votes: 0

As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression. Votes: 0

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken. Votes: 0

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire. Votes: 0

During the patriarchal time, the men were always and invariably dominant, legally and socially in marriage, so now it's possible to remodel the entire house of marriage, put in new footings and new joists and a new sort of interior. That is exactly what some men and women are now doing. Votes: 0

Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink. Votes: 0

Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture. Votes: 0

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. Votes: 0

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you. Votes: 0

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings. Votes: 0

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing. Votes: 0

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness. Votes: 0

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me. Votes: 0

I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket. Votes: 0

I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea. Votes: 0

I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon. Votes: 0

I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people. Votes: 0

I knew this friendship with myself couldn't last forever. Votes: 0

I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful. Votes: 0

I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society. Votes: 0

I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone. Votes: 0

I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal. Votes: 0

I want nothing from You but to see You. Votes: 0

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore. Votes: 0

If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it; the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up. Votes: 0

If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance. Votes: 0

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside. Votes: 0

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies. Votes: 0

In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People. Votes: 0

In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are. Votes: 0

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good. Votes: 0

It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down. Votes: 0

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die. Votes: 0

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes. Votes: 0

My life failed on the very day I was born. Votes: 0

Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately. Votes: 0

One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising. Votes: 0

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses. Votes: 0

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!' Votes: 0

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music. Votes: 0

People tend to take stories literally these days. Votes: 0

Poetry keeps longing alive. Votes: 0

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry. Votes: 0

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person. Votes: 0

Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border. Votes: 0

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief. Votes: 0

Sociological prose is generally written without images in an exact form for an academic audience. Votes: 0

Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry. Votes: 0

Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison; they turn to poetry. Votes: 0

The ancestors are very much invested in the children, because the children are the ones who are going to continue the world that the ancestors made. Votes: 0

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences. Votes: 0

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed. Votes: 0

The candle is not lit To give light, but to testify to the night. Votes: 0

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs. Votes: 0

The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge... Votes: 0

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large. Votes: 0

The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to. Votes: 0

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal. Votes: 0

The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like. Votes: 0

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends. Votes: 0

The lead either forges an instant connection with the reader, or the package fails. Votes: 0

The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult? Votes: 0

The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation. Votes: 0

The Roman Catholic Church early on simply adapted the hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire and confused the whole thing. Vertical attention and hierarchy were so entangled, that when the French killed the king during the Revolution, they lost much of their vertical attention too. Votes: 0

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society. Votes: 0

The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them. Votes: 0

There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone. Votes: 0

There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion. Votes: 0

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget. Votes: 0

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry. Votes: 0

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods. Votes: 0

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is. Votes: 0

To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years. Votes: 0

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend. Votes: 0

Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy-that's the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the highest thing. . . . Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached-to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music. Votes: 0

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere. Votes: 0

Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.' Votes: 0

Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars. Votes: 0

We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life. Votes: 0

We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again. Votes: 0

We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?' Votes: 0

We make the path by walking. Votes: 0

We spend our life until we're twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Votes: 0

What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble. Votes: 0

What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have. Votes: 0

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing. Votes: 0

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children. Votes: 0

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression. Votes: 0

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning. Votes: 0

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you. Votes: 0

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway. Votes: 0