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 GRAVESA perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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 -
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
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The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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 -
There’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
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The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
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I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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.
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Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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.
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The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
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A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
ROBERT GRAVES -
What we now call “finance” is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
ROBERT GRAVES