Robert Bly Quotes

The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature.

The groves were God's first temples.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

There is an ideology problem in Islam. We need to revolutionize our religion.

Ninety-nine percent of the things that seem weird in my life can be answered with my religion. Paganism is mostly about nature-worship. It's about being in harmony with your environment and bringing the world of spirit and world of man together. It's about balance.

A vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in Flowers or music.

Nature is God's workshop. The sky is his resume. The universe is his calling card. You want to know who God is? See what he has done.

Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.

Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.

when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings.

How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.

The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day.

What was once easy became confused and hard, which brings us back to the mystic question, who is God?

I think poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people. The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people, whether Christian or not, how to pray.

If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.

Human society is a ceaseless growth, and unfoldment in terms of spirituality.

Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion.

I love God, and when you get to know Him, you find He's a Livin' Doll.

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

People don't so much believe in God as that they choose not to believe in nothing.

How strange that some people cannot believe in both the Book of Nature and the Book of God.