Robert Graves Quotes

79 quotes in 1342 categories

• 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…
• 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.
• Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
• There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
• A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in…
• With eager dragon-eyes;
• 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.
• Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked…
• The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
• Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
• 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 sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir Will celebrate with green the Mother, And every song-bird shout awhile for her; But we are…
• One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
• What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
• Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
• Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome…
• 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…
• There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
• If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.
• Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

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