Quote

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

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
Deeply
Tragedy
Sweet
Higher
Sinks
Goes
Drowning
Water
Waters
Spirit
Melancholy
Soul
Rising

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
Robert Bly
Image
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Robert Bly
Image
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
Robert Bly
Image
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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
We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
Robert Bly
Image
Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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 models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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
One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture that is why suburban children want rap music.
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
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly
Image
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
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
Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
Robert Bly