To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
ROBERT GRAVESHate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
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When I’m killed, don’t think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there’s one thing that I know well, I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!
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Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
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The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
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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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The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
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But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
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Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
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You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
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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.
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There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
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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.
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Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
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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 gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of Her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
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No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
ROBERT GRAVES






