Robert Bly
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.Collection: Dad
The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.Collection: Nature
... where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be.Collection: Men
Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.Collection: Hostile
The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.Collection: Eye
We make the path by walking.Collection: Path
The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.Collection: Warrior
As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.Collection: Being Yourself
It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.Collection: Wings
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.Collection: Trying
My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.Collection: Healing
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.Collection: Doors
We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five 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.Collection: Life
The candle is not lit To give light, but to testify to the night.Collection: Night
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.Collection: Sad
The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Distance
Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.Collection: Fire
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.Collection: Personality
I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.Collection: Relaxation
Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.Collection: Beauty
What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Fear
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.Collection: Religious
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.Collection: Grief
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.Collection: Grief
The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.Collection: Sibling
I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.Collection: Children
There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.Collection: Buddhist
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.Collection: People
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.Collection: Party
You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.Collection: Writing
One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'Collection: Men
I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.Collection: Infidelity
I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.Collection: Forever
I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.Collection: Roots
Sociological prose is generally written without images in an exact form for an academic audience.Collection: Academic
The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.Collection: Pascal
Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.Collection: Catholic
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.Collection: Library
I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Native American
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?Collection: Men
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.Collection: Father
The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?Collection: Two
Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.Collection: Past