241 Quotes by Robert Graves

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams—mad but interesting.

Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.

You don't want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.

...but [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.

I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.

Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch's wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself—either an Emperor or an idiot.