Robert Bly Quotes - Page 2

I want nothing from You but to see You.

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.

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

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.

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