Robert Bly Quotes

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

It's good to pass on stories.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

One of the greatest gifts we can give to another generation is our experience, our wisdom.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

It's a wonderful feeling being a bridge to the past and unite generations.

The dead govern the living.

Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical.

By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth. By encouraging Jews to grow beards, it reminds them that they will not be young forever, that they must prepare the ground for those who come after, just as their fathers did for them.

The older I get, the more important the eternal becomes to me personally.

I really don’t make history; I preserve it.

For those things which were done either by our fathers or ancestors, and in which we ourselves had no share, I can scarcely call our own.

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

I'm very much into legacies.

I think you can always learn lessons by the guys who came before you.

I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

I wanted a way to pass on all the gifts, all the instruction that I've been given.

The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

Culture is coded wisdom

Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage.