Top 160 Robert Graves Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams – mad but interesting.”

— Robert Graves

102. “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

103. “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.”

— Robert Graves

104. “Most men – it is my experience – are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.”

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

106. “My plans were vague. I talked liberty to many of my friends and, you know how it is, when one talks liberty everything seems beautifully simple. One expects all gates to open and all walls to fall flat and all voices to shout for joy.”

— Robert Graves

107. “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

108. “That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.”

— Robert Graves

109. “All civil wars are dynastic wars, my lord King; all overseas wars are trade wars,” agreed the portly Hyrian.”

— Robert Graves

110. “Peleus lived to a good age and survived his famous son Achilles, an initiate of the Centaur Horse fraternity, who was killed at the siege of Troy.”

— Robert Graves

111. “Once you give way to a metaphor, Claudius, which is rare, you pursue it too far. Surely you remember Athenodorus’s injunctions against this sort of thing? Well, call Sejanus the maggot and get it done with; then return to your usual homely style!”

— Robert Graves

112. “Wakeful they lie.”

— Robert Graves

113. “If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”

— Robert Graves

114. “What we now call “finance” is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.”

— Robert Graves

115. “I had in the first place spoken extremely frankly, and unexpected frankness about oneself is never unacceptable.”

— Robert Graves

116. “He also said that everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia.”

— Robert Graves

117. “But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.”

— Robert Graves

118. “None the less he allowed “triumphal ornaments” – an embroidered robe, a statue, a chaplet, and so on – to be awarded to those who would otherwise have earned a triumph; this should be a sufficient incentive to any good soldier to fight a necessary war.”

— Robert Graves

119. “There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading – he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.”

— Robert Graves

Featured in: Reading Quotes

120. “Two are needed to make a comradeship, but only one to dissolve it.”

— Robert Graves

121. “However, to think with perfect clarity in a poetic sense one must first rid oneself of a great deal of intellectual encumbrance, including all dogmatic doctrinal prepossessions: membership of any political party or religious sect or literary school deforms the poetic sense – as it were, introduces something irrelevant and destructive into the magic circle, drawn with a rowan, hazel or willow rod, within which the poet insulates himself for the poetic act.”

— Robert Graves

122. “But, after all, what is a scholar? One who may not break bounds under pain of expulsion from the academy of which he is a member.”

— Robert Graves

123. “Before the succession of Deiphobe, whom Augustus often consulted, and Amalthea, who is still alive and most famous, there had been a run of very poor Sibyls for nearly 300 years. The cavern lies behind a pretty little Greek temple sacred to Apollo and Artemis – Cumae was an Aeolian Greek colony.”

— Robert Graves

124. “This is not by any means my first book: in fact literature, and especially the writing of history – which as a young man I studied here at Rome under the best contemporary masters – was, until the change came, my sole profession and interest for more than thirty-five years.”

— Robert Graves

125. “A third general cause of confusion has been timidity. A fear of feeling definitely committed to any statement that might cause trouble or inconvenience seems to haunt almost everyone in Britain who holds a public position, however unimportant.”

— Robert Graves

126. “I’ll tell you a story. There was once a badly wounded man lying on the battle-field waiting for the surgeon to dress his wound, which was covered with flies. A lightly wounded comrade saw the flies and was going to drive them away. ‘Oh, no,’ cried the wounded man, ’don’t do that! These flies are almost gorged with my blood now and aren’t hurting me nearly so much as they did at first: if you drive them away their place will be taken at once by hungrier ones, and that will be the end of me.”

— Robert Graves

127. “Yet myths, though difficult to reconcile with chronology, are always practical: they insist on some point of tradition, however distorted the meaning may have become in the telling.”

— Robert Graves

128. “The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them.”

— Robert Graves

129. “In demonstrating how not to use metaphors, they quote a line from a Graham Greene novel: “Kay Rimmer sat with her head in her hands and her eyes on the floor.” Their reply: “And her teeth on the mantelpiece?”

— Robert Graves

130. “Some Hellenes say that Athene had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later tried to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of his skin to make the aegis, and of his wings for her own shoulders; if indeed the aegis was not the skin of Medusa the Gorgon, whom she flayed after Perseus had decapitated her.”

— Robert Graves

131. “Malaria, measles, colitis, scrofula, erysipelas. The whole battalion answers ‘present,’ Xenophon, except epilepsy, venereal disease and megalomania.”

— Robert Graves

132. “Some say that Darkness was first, and from Darkness sprang Chaos. From a union between Darkness and Chaos sprang Night, Day, Erebus, and the Air.”

— Robert Graves

133. “At her bidding, Ophion coiled seven times around this egg, until it hatched and split in two. Out tumbles all things that exist, her children; sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures.”

— Robert Graves

134. “Core’s abduction by Hades forms part of the myth in which the Hellenic trinity of gods forcibly marry the pre-Hellenic Triple-goddess-Zeus, Hera, Zeus or Poseidon, Demeter; Hades, Core-as in Irish myth Brian, Iuchar, and Fucharaba marry the Triple-goddess Eire, Fodla, and Banba. It refers to male usurpation of the female agricultural mysteries in primitive times.”

— Robert Graves

135. “A new stage was reached when animals came to the substituted for boys at the sacrificial altar, and the king refused death after his lengthened reign ended.”

— Robert Graves

136. “The lives of such characters as Heracles, Daedalus, Teiresias, and Phineus span several generations, because these are titles rather than names of particular heroes.”

— Robert Graves

137. “The planetary powers were as follows: sun for illumination; Moon for enchantment; Mars for growth; Mercury for wisdom; Jupiter for law; Venus for love; Saturn for peace.”

— Robert Graves

138. “Yet I had a clean conscience about them. Vinicianus and Asiaticus were clearly traitors, and Vinicius, I thought, had died as the result of an accident. But the Senate and People knew Messalina better than I did, and hated me because of her. That was the invisible barrier between them and me, and nobody had the courage to break it down.”

— Robert Graves

139. “Now, in Constantinople, there is a square called the Square of Brotherly Love, with a fine group of statuary on a tall pedestal commemorating the fraternal devotion of the sons of the Emperor Constantine, who subsequently destroyed one another without mercy.”

— Robert Graves

140. “Virgin-priestesses of Neith engaged annually in armed combat, apparently for the position of High-priestess.”

— Robert Graves

141. “In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of all Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves.”

— Robert Graves

142. “As a girl, she killed her playmate, Pallas, by accident, while they were engaged in friendly combat with spear and shield and, in a token of grief, set Pallas’ name before her own.”

— Robert Graves

143. “For my experience as a historian is that more documents survive by chance than by intention.”

— Robert Graves

144. “Night’s sceptre passed to Uranus with the advent of patriarchalism.”

— Robert Graves

145. “Rhea, paired with Cronus as Titaness of the seventh day, may be equated with Dione, Diana, the Triple-Goddess of the Dove and Oak cult.”

— Robert Graves

146. “How happy are the decrepit old men who at the end of a long life of slavery can breathe their last breath today with that sweet phrase on their lips – ‘We are free’!”

— Robert Graves

147. “The king deputized for the Queen at many sacred functions, dressed in her robes, wore false breasts, borrowed her lunar axe as a symbol of power, and even took over from her the magical art of rain-making.”

— Robert Graves

148. “Sleeplessness had made me very irritable. I said that, for my part, I was in no mood to receive them: I liked men who clung courageously to their opinions.”

— Robert Graves

149. “Constitutionally, eh? I must bow of course to your superior authority as an antiquarian, but has the word ‘constitution’ any practical meaning today?”

— Robert Graves

150. “There’s no harm in loving the dead, everybody’s loved when they’re dead.”

— Robert Graves