Robert Bly Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

We make the path by walking.

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.

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.

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.

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

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

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

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

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

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.

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.

As a parent you have to do some renunciation.

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.

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

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

I want nothing from You but to see You.

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.

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

Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.

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.

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

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.

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.

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.

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

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.

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

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

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.

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.

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

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

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