Robert Bly Quotes

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

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.

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.

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

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

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

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

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.

I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.

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.

All of those on the left, as I am, have always vastly preferred the democratic society over the hierarchical society and still do, but the democratic culture doesn't exist without highly informed citizens capable of thinking well, and if you have schools in which 40 percent of the people coming out of them cannot make change for a dollar, you don't have a democracy. You have a sibling society.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

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.

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

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

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

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

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

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

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

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

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

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

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.

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

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.

All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.

We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'

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

The Roman Catholic Church early on simply adapted the hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire and confused the whole thing. Vertical attention and hierarchy were so entangled, that when the French killed the king during the Revolution, they lost much of their vertical attention too.

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

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

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.

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.

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

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

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.

Adolescents are in just as much trouble in Native America as they are in the white community.

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

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.

Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.

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

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

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

The ancestors are very much invested in the children, because the children are the ones who are going to continue the world that the ancestors made.