Explore Quotes by Robert Bly

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 best presenters have conversations with their audiences.

We did not come to remain whole._x000D__x000D_We came to lose our leaves like the trees,_x000D__x000D_Trees that start again.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

My life failed on the very day I was born.

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

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.