Quotes from Robert Bly

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.

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.

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

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

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

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

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

I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

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

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

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison; they turn to poetry.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

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

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.

As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

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

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

I have wandered in a face, for hours,Passing through dark fires.I have risen to a bodyNot yet born,Existing like a light around the body,Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.