Robert Graves Quotes

142 Sourced Quotes

Far away is close at hand
Close joined is far away,
Love shall come at your command
Yet will not stay.

Robert Graves
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.

Robert Graves
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Robert Graves
One, two and many: flesh had made him blind,
Flesh had one pleasure only in the act,
Flesh set one purpose only in the mind —
Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find
Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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