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.

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

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

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.

We make the path by walking.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.