Top 100 Robert Graves Quotes
#2. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#3. Love at first sight'some say misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.
But friendship at first sight? This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches then blushes.
Robert Graves
#4. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#6. Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.
Robert Graves
#7. Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave 's narrowness, though not its peace.
Robert Graves
#8. She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
Robert Graves
#9. But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.
Robert Graves
#10. On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.
Robert Graves
#11. There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either. - Robert Graves
Robert Graves
#12. I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.
Robert Graves
#13. Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
Robert Graves
#14. Those that can't beat the ass, beat the saddle.
Robert Graves
#15. Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
Robert Graves
#16. Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.
Robert Graves
#17. The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams - mad but interesting.
Robert Graves
#18. Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
Robert Graves
#19. There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves
#20. Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
Robert Graves
#21. Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
Robert Graves
#22. But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
Robert Graves
#23. The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
Robert Graves
#24. England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
Robert Graves
#25. The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
Robert Graves
#26. There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
Robert Graves
#27. Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.
Robert Graves
#28. This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
#29. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
Robert Graves
#30. When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!
Robert Graves
#33. Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Robert Graves
#34. Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus.
Robert Graves
#35. there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.
Robert Graves
#36. One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
Robert Graves
#37. He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
Robert Graves
#38. Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him.
Robert Graves
#39. In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
Robert Graves
#40. Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
Robert Graves
#41. I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
Robert Graves
#42. I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.
Robert Graves
#43. Claudius, you're luckier than you realize. Guard your appointment jealously. Don't let anyone usurp it."
"What do you mean, girl?"
"I mean that people don't kill their butts. They are cruel to them, they frighten them, they rob them, but they don't kill them.
Robert Graves
#44. I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
#45. I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate
Robert Graves
#46. Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.
Robert Graves
#47. Nor had I any illusions about Algernon Charles Swinburne, who often used to stop my perambulator when he met it on Nurses' Walk, at the edge of Wimbledon Common, and pat me on the head and kiss me: he was an inveterate pram-stopper and patter and kisser.
Robert Graves
#48. There's no money in poetry. Then again, there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
#49. As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
Robert Graves
#51. No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation - in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
Robert Graves
#52. Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
Robert Graves
#53. You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
Robert Graves
#54. Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight
Robert Graves
#55. If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.
Robert Graves
#56. You know how it is when one talks of liberty. Everything seems beautifully simple. One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.
Robert Graves
#57. My plans were vague. I talked liberty to many of my friends and, you know how it is, when one talks liberty everything seems beautifully simple. One expects all gates to open and all walls to fall flat and all voices to shout for joy.
Robert Graves
#58. I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.
Robert Graves
#59. But [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone's orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.
Robert Graves
#60. For words of rapture groping, they"Never such love," swore "ever before was!"
Robert Graves
#61. Most men - it is my experience - are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
Robert Graves
#62. A song? What laughter or what song
Can this house remember?
Do flowers and butterflies
Belong to a blind December?
Robert Graves
#63. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.
Robert Graves
#64. No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
Robert Graves
#65. English poetic education should, really, not begin with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with Song of Amergin.
Robert Graves
#66. Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves
#67. Time is not the stable moving-staircase that prosemen have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble
Robert Graves
#69. Every fairy child may keep Two strong ponies and ten sheep; All have houses, each his own, Built of brick or granite stone; They live on cherries, they run wild I'd love to be a Fairy's child.
Robert Graves
#70. The Argonauts looked at one another in amazement and exclaimed with one voice: 'Hercules!
Robert Graves
#71. The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
Robert Graves
#72. To resist the social pressure now put even on one's leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one's own way, than ever before.
Robert Graves
#73. I have done many impious things
no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.
Robert Graves
#75. Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.
Robert Graves
#76. To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.
Robert Graves
#77. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.
Robert Graves
#78. To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
Robert Graves
#79. What we now call 'finance' is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Robert Graves
#80. Yet let me warn you to beware of the one-sandalled man: he will hate you, and before he has done his hatred will make mince-meat of you.
Robert Graves
#81. Black drinks the sun and draws all colours into it.
I am bleached white, my truant love. Come back,
and stain me with the intensity of black.
Robert Graves
#82. There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
Robert Graves
#83. When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
Robert Graves
#84. If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I'd store up no virtue For Heaven's distant plain, I'd live at ease as I did please And sin once again.
Robert Graves
#85. You don't want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.
Robert Graves
#87. The old lady told me that all the girls in the village of Annezin prayed every night for the War to end, and for the English to go away - as soon as their money was spent. And that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
Robert Graves
#88. Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.
Robert Graves
#89. Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage Once more with pomp and greed and rage; Courtly ministers will stop At home and fight to the last drop; By the million men will die In some new horrible agony ...
Robert Graves
#90. If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
Robert Graves
#91. But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Robert Graves
#92. The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills.
Robert Graves
#93. New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.
Robert Graves
#94. Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
Robert Graves
#97. A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.
Robert Graves
#98. There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money.
Robert Graves
#99. The first thing that happened was that Helen became an invalid - we know now that there was nothing wrong with her, but Livilla had given her the choice of taking to her bed as if she were ill or taking to her bed because she was ill.
Robert Graves
#100. Children born of fairy stock Never need for shirt or frock, Never want for food or fire, Always get their heart's desire ...
Robert Graves
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
