Robert Graves Quotes

142 Sourced Quotes

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Robert Graves
A difficult achievement for true lovers
Is to lie mute, without embrace or kiss,
Without a rustle or a smothered sigh,
Basking each in the other's glory.

Robert Graves
Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.
One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument.

Robert Graves
He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

Robert Graves
Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read, you boys,
My Country Sentiment.

Robert Graves
Poets are guardians
Of a shadowy island
With granges and forest
Warmed by the Moon

Robert Graves
As you are woman, so be lovely:
As you are lovely, so be various,
Merciful as constant, constant as various,
So be mine, as I yours for ever.

Robert Graves
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse. Its use is the experience of mixed exultation and horror that her presence excites.

Robert Graves
Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

Robert Graves
If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

Robert Graves
The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.

Robert Graves
The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

Robert Graves
About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman's education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

Robert Graves
Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.

Robert Graves
What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

Robert Graves
Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.

Robert Graves
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Robert Graves
No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

Robert Graves
Beware, madam, of the witty devil,
The arch intriguer who walks disguised
In a poet's cloak, his gay tongue oozing evil.

Robert Graves
Love, the sole Goddess fit for swearing by,
Concedes us graciously the little lie:
The white lie, the half lie, the lie corrective
Without which love's exchange might prove defective,
Confirming hazardous relationships
By kindly maquillage of Truth's pale lips.

Robert Graves
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

Robert Graves
Kill if you must, but never hate:
Man is but grass and hate is blight,
The sun will scorch you soon or late,
Die wholesome then, since you must fight.

Robert Graves
The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: "Write something new:
We've read this poem — that one too,
And twelve more like 'em yesterday"?

Robert Graves
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?

Robert Graves
I suddenly realized with my first shudder of gentility that two sorts of Christians existed — ourselves, and the lower classes.

Robert Graves
Another War soon gets begun,
A dirtier, a more glorious one;
Then, boys, you'll have to play, all in;
It's the cruellest team will win.
So hold your nose against the stink
And never stop too long to think.
Wars don't change except in name;
The next one must go just the same,
And new foul tricks unguessed before
Will win and justify this War.

Robert Graves
Through the window I can see
Rooks above the cherry-tree,
Sparrows in the violet bed,
Bramble-bush and bumble-bee,
And old red bracken smoulders still
Among boulders on the hill,
Far too bright to seem quite dead.
But old Death, who can't forget,
Waits his time and watches yet,
Waits and watches by the door.

Robert Graves
At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."

Robert Graves
Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.

Robert Graves
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves