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By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.

Robert Bly

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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Right
Work
Men
Received
Time
Images
Life
Tough
High
True
School

More quotes by Robert Bly

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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Robert Bly
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
Robert Bly
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
Robert Bly
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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
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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
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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Robert Bly
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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
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I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket.
Robert Bly
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
Robert Bly
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly
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The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.
Robert Bly
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Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
Robert Bly
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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
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
Robert Bly
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All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
Robert Bly
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly