Robert Bly famous quotes

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Warrior #Boys #Men

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

#Hands #Two #Ties

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

#Doors #Soul #Needs

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

#Wings #Way #Grows

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
-- Robert Bly

#Love Is #Emptiness #Horror

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

#Crazy #Voice #Silence

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

#Relaxation #Proud #Tenderness

I want nothing from You but to see You.
-- Robert Bly

#Want

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

#Library #Persons

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

#Men #Genius #Wounds

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

#Personality #Mindfulness

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

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Dream #Falling In Love #Husband

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

#Writing #Healing #Feelings

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

#Being Yourself #Taken #Might

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

#Moving #Moon #Light

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
-- Robert Bly

#Business #Conversation #Audience

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

#School #Men #Tough

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

#Moving #Heart #Males

Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
-- Robert Bly

#Son #Men #Legs

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

#Lying #Men #Hair

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Wall #Men #Car

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
-- Robert Bly

#Men #Tragedy #Depth

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

#Children #Rap #Men

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.
-- Robert Bly

#Water #Drowning

My life failed on the very day I was born.
-- Robert Bly

#Born

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

#Crafts #Use #Language

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Fear #Health #Men

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

#Moving #Lazy #Sometimes

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

#Men #Emotional #Discipline

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
-- Robert Bly

#Pain

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Commitment #Thinking #Leaving

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

#Children #Father #Teaching

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

#Daughter #Son #Hands

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
-- Robert Bly

#Past #Two #Bird

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

#Being Alone #Tree

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

#Sacred #Wellspring

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

#Party #Heaven #Delicacy

We make the path by walking.
-- Robert Bly

#Path #Walking

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Religious #Writing #Character

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
-- Robert Bly

#Fire #Giving #Be Careful

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

#Night #Light #Giving

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
-- Robert Bly

#Art #Grief #Years

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

#Trying #Twenties #Bags

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
-- Robert Bly

#Grief #Men #Feelings

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

#Journey #Other Worlds #Wings

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

#Obsession #Calamity #Humans

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Song #Children #Ideas

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

#Religious #Religion #Might

I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
-- Robert Bly

#Forever #Lasts

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

#Roots #Crafts #Longing

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

#Writing #Wells

And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
-- Robert Bly

#Men #Earth #Caught

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

#Sad #Sorrow #Able

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Life #School #Men

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
-- Robert Bly

#Infidelity #Unfaithful

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.
-- Robert Bly

#Beauty #Flower #Garden

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

#Mom #Love Is #Being A Mom

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

#Men #Needs #Fart