Robert Graves
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.Collection: Science
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.Collection: Money
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.Collection: Marriage
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.Collection: Poetry
What we now call 'finance' is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.Collection: Finance
Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.Collection: Money
A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.
There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.Collection: Writing
Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. . . . Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'. . . . The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs.Collection: Religious
One smile relieves a heart that grieves.Collection: Heart
Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.Collection: Simple
Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fightCollection: Hate
Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.Collection: Hate
The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills.Collection: People
The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.Collection: Simple
For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.Collection: Cutting
Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.Collection: Strong
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.Collection: People
New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.Collection: Spring
Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.Collection: English Grammar
Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.Collection: Love
As you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever.Collection: Lovely
The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.Collection: Taken
What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.Collection: Intellectual
Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.Collection: Facts
The difference between you and her (whom I to you did once prefer) Is clear enough to settle: She like a diamond shone, but you Shine like an early drop of dew Poised on a red rose petal. The dew-drop carries in its eye Mountain and forest, sea and sky, With every change of weather; Contrariwise, a diamond splits The prospect into idle bits That none can piece together.Collection: Eye
You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?Collection: Mean
When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!Collection: Thinking
Through the window I can see Rooks above the cherry-tree, Sparrows in the violet bed, Bramble-bush and bumble-bee, And old red bracken smoulders still Among boulders on the hill, Far too bright to seem quite dead. But old Death, who can't forget, Waits his time and watches yet, Waits and watches by the door.Collection: Doors
For words of rapture groping, they"Never such love," swore "ever before was!"Collection: I Love You
I have done many impious things--no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.Collection: Done
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.Collection: Daughter
The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.Collection: War
The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.Collection: Writing
We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.Collection: Betrayal
The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.Collection: Writing
Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.Collection: Taken
To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.Collection: Children
Children born of fairy stock Never need for shirt or frock, Never want for food or fire, Always get their heart's desire.Collection: Children