Robert Bly Quotes

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

Robert Bly

#2. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#4. We make the path by walking.

Robert Bly

#5. Some men live with an invisible limp,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons are often angry.

Robert Bly

#6. Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community.

Robert Bly

#7. Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

Robert Bly

#8. Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness.

Robert Bly

#9. It's hard to grasp how much generosity
Is involved in letting us go on breathing,
When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief.
Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for
Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat
When so many have gone down in the storm.

Robert Bly

#10. READY TO SLEEP
Don't be afraid
The great lettuce of the world
Is all around us.

Robert Bly

#11. 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.

Robert Bly

#12. There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.

Robert Bly

#13. Hair is intuition. Hair is the abundance of perceptions, insights, thoughts, resentments, images, fantasies waiting and ready to come out whenever we are thinking of something else.

Robert Bly

#14. It's all right if people think we are idiots.
It's all right if we lie face down on the earth.
It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#17. This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize.

Robert Bly

#18. 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.

Robert Bly

#19. 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.

Robert Bly

#20. It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

Robert Bly

#21. 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.

Robert Bly

#22. My life failed on the very day I was born.

Robert Bly

#23. 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.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#25. 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.

Robert Bly

#26. 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.

Robert Bly

#27. 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.

Robert Bly

#28. The human face shines as it speaks of things
Near itself, thoughts full of dreams.
The human face shines like a dark sky
As it speaks of those things that oppress the living

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#31. As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Robert Bly

#32. I knew this friendship with myself couldn't last forever.

Robert Bly

#33. There's a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority.

Robert Bly

#34. Contemporary man looks down into his psyche, he may, if conditions are right, find under the water of his soul, lying in an area no one has visited for a long time, an ancient hairy man.

Robert Bly

#35. One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

Robert Bly

#36. The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.

Robert Bly

#37. The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

Robert Bly

#38. I know men who are healthier at fifty than they've ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.

Robert Bly

#39. Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

Robert Bly

#40. I am proud only of those days that pass in
undivided tenderness.

Robert Bly

#41. 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.

Robert Bly

#42. Like a note of music, you are about to become nothing

Robert Bly

#43. I am afraid there'll be a moment when
I fail you, friend; I will turn slightly
Away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field
There will be no one.

Robert Bly

#44. We will have to call especially loud to reach Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Robert Bly

#45. It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

Robert Bly

#46. 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)

Robert Bly

#47. Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.

Robert Bly

#48. 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

Robert Bly

#49. I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.

Robert Bly

#50. The candle is not lit
To give light, but to testify to the night.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#52. 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.

Robert Bly

#53. It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.

Robert Bly

#54. What has death and a thick body dances before what has no thick body and no death. The trumpet says: "I am you." The spiritual master arrives and bows down to the beginning student. Try to live to see this!

Robert Bly

#55. The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

Robert Bly

#56. 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.

Robert Bly

#57. 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.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#59. Angels began shining when they achieved discipline.

Robert Bly

#60. Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

Robert Bly

#61. Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

Robert Bly

#62. The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.

Robert Bly

#63. 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.

Robert Bly

#64. The lead either forges an instant connection with the reader, or the package fails.

Robert Bly

#65. 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.

Robert Bly

#66. Last night in my dream a man I did not know whispered in my ear that he was disappointed with me, and that I had lost his friendship.

Robert Bly

#67. When a man says to a woman, "You are my anima," she should quickly scream and run out of the room. The word anima has neither the greatness of the Woman with Golden Hair nor the greatness of an ordinary woman, who wants to be loved as a woman.

Robert Bly

#68. 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.

Robert Bly

#69. Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.

Robert Bly

#70. Where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

#72. Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.

Robert Bly

#73. If any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality.

Robert Bly

#74. I want nothing from You but to see You.

Robert Bly

#75. We are bees then; our honey is language.

Robert Bly

#76. Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.

Robert Bly

#77. Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly