Top 120 Robert Graves Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.”

— Robert Graves

52. “Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.”

— Robert Graves

53. “Some say that when the brothers met they were moved by true affection; that Esau forgave Jacob as they kissed and embraced; and that equal loving-kindness was shown between the many cousins, their children. Others, however, say that when Esau fell upon Jacob’s neck, he tried to bite through his jugular vein, but the neck became hard as ivory, blunting Esau’s teeth, which he therefore gnashed in futile rage.”

— Robert Graves

54. “Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”

— Robert Graves

55. “I have myself eaten the hallucinogenic mushroom, psilocybe, a divine ambrosia in immemorial use among the Masatec Indians of Oaxaca Province, Mexico; hear the priestess invoke Tlaloc, the Mushroom-god, and seen transcendental visions. Thus I wholeheartedly agree with R. Gordon Wasson, the American discoverer of this ancient rite, that European ideas of heaven and hell may well have derived from similar mysteries.”

— Robert Graves

56. “The old lady told me that all the girls in the village of Annezin prayed every night for the War to end, and for the English to go away – as soon as their money was spent. And that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.”

— Robert Graves

57. “The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”

— Robert Graves

58. “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.”

— Robert Graves

59. “Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him.”

— Robert Graves

60. “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.”

— Robert Graves

61. “Love at first sight’some say misnaming Discovery of twinned helplessness Against the huge tug of procreation. But friendship at first sight? This also Catches fiercely at the surprised heart So that the cheek blanches then blushes.”

— Robert Graves

62. “English poetic education should, really, not begin with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with Song of Amergin.”

— Robert Graves

63. “Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.”

— Robert Graves

64. “We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.”

— Robert Graves

65. “He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.”

— Robert Graves

66. “Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.”

— Robert Graves

67. “England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.”

— Robert Graves

68. “Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.”

— Robert Graves

69. “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.”

— Robert Graves

70. “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.”

— Robert Graves

71. “Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.”

— Robert Graves

72. “If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I’d store up no virtue For Heaven’s distant plain, I’d live at ease as I did please And sin once again.”

— Robert Graves

73. “Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.”

— Robert Graves

74. “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.”

— Robert Graves

75. “I think,’ said Arete with warmth, ’that to go to sleep on a problem which one is too lazy to solve is a most foolish procedure.”

— Robert Graves

76. “At last, hopelessly surveying myself all over, I was obliged to face the mortifying fact that I had been transformed not into a bird, but into a plain jackass.”

— Robert Graves

77. “Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.”

— Robert Graves

78. “To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.”

— Robert Graves

79. “His one fault, if you may call it so, was that he kept silent in the presence of evil when speech would not remedy it.”

— Robert Graves

80. “You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?”

— Robert Graves

81. “Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.”

— Robert Graves

82. “To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

— Robert Graves

83. “I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.”

— Robert Graves

84. “I am not a conscious hypocrite. I flattered myself that I was acting for the best. I.”

— Robert Graves

85. “The first thing that happened was that Helen became an invalid – we know now that there was nothing wrong with her, but Livilla had given her the choice of taking to her bed as if she were ill or taking to her bed because she was ill.”

— Robert Graves

86. “I revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.”

— Robert Graves

87. “Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage Once more with pomp and greed and rage; Courtly ministers will stop At home and fight to the last drop; By the million men will die In some new horrible agony...”

— Robert Graves

88. “Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.”

— Robert Graves

89. “It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch’s wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself – either an Emperor or an idiot.”

— Robert Graves

90. “On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.”

— Robert Graves

91. “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.”

— Robert Graves

92. “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.”

— Robert Graves

93. “Yet let me warn you to beware of the one-sandalled man: he will hate you, and before he has done his hatred will make mince-meat of you.”

— Robert Graves

94. “About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.”

— Robert Graves

95. “The familiar Olympian system was then agreed upon as a compromise between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic views: a divine family of six gods and six goddesses, headed by the co-sovereigns Zeus and Hera and forming a Council of Gods in Babylonian style.”

— Robert Graves

96. “The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams – mad but interesting.”

— Robert Graves

97. “Augustus approved of Livia’s educative methods with Julia and of her domestic arrangements and economies. He had simple tastes himself. His palate was so insensitive that he did not notice the difference between virgin olive oil and the last rank squeezings when the olive-paste has gone a third time through the press.”

— Robert Graves

98. “You don’t want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.”

— Robert Graves

99. “The Governor of Syria, when he heard of this horrid act called a council of his staff to decide whether Mithridates should be avenged by a punitive expedition against his murderer, who now reigned in his stead; but the general opinion seemed to be that the more treacherous and bloody the behaviour of Eastern kings on our frontier, the better for us – the security of the Roman Empire resting on the mutual mistrust of our neighbours – and that nothing should be done.”

— Robert Graves

100. “Poems are like people’ I said ‘There are not many authentic ones around.”

— Robert Graves