Robert Bly Quotes

“A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.”

“I know men who are healthier at fifty than they've ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.”

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”

“Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.”

“The joy of being alone, eating the honey of words.”

“We are bees then; our honey is language.”

“Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.”

“I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.”

“If any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality.”

“So the person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger.

If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.”

“The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us,”

“We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again, Drawing up from the great roots.”

“Contemporary man looks down into his psyche, he may, if conditions are right, find under the water of his soul, lying in an area no one has visited for a long time, an ancient hairy man.”

“Hair is intuition. Hair is the abundance of perceptions, insights, thoughts, resentments, images, fantasies waiting and ready to come out whenever we are thinking of something else.”

“In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.”

“Men are taught over and over when they are boys that a wound that hurts is shameful. A wound that stops you from continuing to play is a girlish wound. He who is truly a man keeps walking, dragging his guts behind.

Our story gives a teaching diametrically opposite. It says that where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place for which we will give our major gift to the community.”

“Something in the adolescent male wants risk, courts danger, goes out to the edge – even to the edge of death.”

“The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural”, going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.”

“There’s a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority.”

“This resembles the slow discipline of art: it’s the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize.”

“When a man says to a woman, "You are my anima," she should quickly scream and run out of the room. The word anima has neither the greatness of the Woman with Golden Hair nor the greatness of an ordinary woman, who wants to be loved as a woman.”

“Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community.”

“A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.”

“I want nothing from You but to see You.”

“I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.”

“It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.”

“Like a note of music, you are about to become nothing.”

“My life failed on the very day I was born.”

“Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.”

“We will have to call especially loud to reach Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.”