Quote

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

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
Give
Giving
Quickly
Careful
Fire
Away

More quotes by 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 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
Image
One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.
Robert Bly
Image
To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
Robert Bly
Image
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
Robert Bly
Image
The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
Image
I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
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
The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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
There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
Image
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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
Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.
Robert Bly
Image
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly
Image
Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
Robert Bly