Top 120 Robert Graves Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Nobody is familiar with his own profile, and it comes as a shock, when one sees it in a portrait, that one really looks like that to people standing beside one. For one’s full face, because of the familiarity that mirrors give it, a certain toleration and even affection is felt; but I must say that when I first saw the model of the gold piece that the mint-masters were striking for me I grew angry and asked whether it was intended to be a caricature.”

— Robert Graves

103. “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

104. “The Argonauts looked at one another in amazement and exclaimed with one voice: ‘Hercules!”

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Wakeful they lie.”

— Robert Graves

109. “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

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

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

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Robert Graves

117. “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

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

— Robert Graves

119. “To use the majesty of law for revenging any petty act of private spite is to make a public confession of weakness, cowardice and an ignoble spirit.” There.”

— Robert Graves

120. “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

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. “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

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. “War was ever an expensive luxury to any nation but to poor carnivores as the Huns or Vikings who had little to lose and much to gain.”

— Robert Graves

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Robert Graves

130. “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

131. “Conversations between persons who do not like one another’s selves are always sterile.”

— Robert Graves

132. “How Graves came to fasten on Claudius as his narrator I have no means of knowing, whether it was after long deliberation or came as a shaft of light. But it is hard to imagine a better vehicle for recounting the first half-century of Imperial Rome – a chronicler who lived at the very centre of its far from healthy heart.”

— Robert Graves