Explore Quotes by Robert Graves

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.

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

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.

When the immense drugged universe explodes In a cascade of unendurable colour And leaves us gasping naked, This is no more than the ectasy of chaos: Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love Which alone, as we know certainly, restores Fragmentation into true being. Ecstasy of Chaos

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.

There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

A well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.

Well, we've been lucky devils both_x000D__x000D_And there is no need for a pledge or oath_x000D__x000D_To bind our lovely friendship fast,_x000D__x000D_ By firmer stuff_x000D__x000D_ Close bound enough.

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.