Top 60 Robert Bly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Robert Bly

2. “We make the path by walking.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

5. “Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

7. “Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.”

— Robert Bly

8. “The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.”

— Robert Bly

9. “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.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

11. “Grief is the doorway to a man’s feelings.”

— Robert Bly

12. “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.”

— Robert Bly

13. “Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.”

— Robert Bly

14. “There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.”

— Robert Bly

15. “I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.”

— Robert Bly

16. “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.”

— Robert Bly

17. “If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.”

— Robert Bly

18. “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

19. “Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

21. “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.”

— Robert Bly

22. “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.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

24. “As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.”

— Robert Bly

25. “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.”

— Robert Bly

26. “The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.”

— Robert Bly

27. “Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.”

— Robert Bly

28. “Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.”

— Robert Bly

29. “I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

33. “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

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

— Robert Bly

35. “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.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

37. “Angels began shining when they achieved discipline.”

— Robert Bly

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

— Robert Bly

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Robert Bly

41. “Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.”

— Robert Bly

42. “The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys – while remaining in the human scale – to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee’s wing.”

— Robert Bly

43. “The candle is not lit To give light, but to testify to the night.”

— Robert Bly

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Robert Bly

46. “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.”

— Robert Bly

47. “As I’ve gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.”

— Robert Bly

48. “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.”

— Robert Bly

49. “The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.”

— Robert Bly

50. “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.”

— Robert Bly