Quote

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

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
Obsessions
Calamity
Obsession
Surely
Human
Humans
Great

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
Robert Bly
Image
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
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
Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
Robert Bly
Image
I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly
Image
There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
Image
We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Robert Bly
Image
Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
Image
Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
Robert Bly
Image
I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
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
The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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
I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
Robert Bly