Robert Bly Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Robert Bly
A great idea is a useful invention, like an eyeglass or a new fuel.

Robert Bly
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.

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

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

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

Robert Bly
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.

Robert Bly
I have wandered in a face, for hours,
Passing through dark fires.
I have risen to a body Not yet born,
Existing like a light around the body,
Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

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

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

Robert Bly
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
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters, the boy
Tortured with the telephone generator,
'I felt sorry for him
And blew his head off with a shotgun.'
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and in your cup you will look down
And see
Black Starfighters.
We were the ones we intended to bomb!

Robert Bly
The sound of the rampaging Missouri,
Bending the reeds again and again—something inside us
Like a ghost train in the Rockies About to be buried in snow!
Its long hoot
Making the owl in the Douglas fir turn his head.

Robert Bly
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
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