Quote

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

Robert Bly

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Teaching
Returns
Return
Boyfriend
Father
Absent
Home
Temperament
Children
Receive
Six
Dad
Tears

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
Image
We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'
Robert Bly
Image
The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly
Image
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
Robert Bly
Image
Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
Robert Bly
Image
I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
Robert Bly
Image
Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
Robert Bly
Image
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
Robert Bly
Image
Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
Robert Bly
Image
I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.
Robert Bly
Image
In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.
Robert Bly
Image
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
Image
The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
Image
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
Robert Bly
Image
The door to the soul is unlocked you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
Robert Bly
Image
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
Image
The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
Image
A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Robert Bly
Image
We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly