Quote

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

More quotes by 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.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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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
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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.
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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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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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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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!'
Robert Bly
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly
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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