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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

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
Moving
Moves
Doe
Male
Males
Heart
Contrary
Toward
Move
Initiation
Achieve
Cultivated
Dies
Achieving

More quotes by Robert Bly

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If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
Robert Bly
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
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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.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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.
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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
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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
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If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
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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
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
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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
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
Robert Bly
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
Robert Bly
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly