We have men loosening the nails on Noah's ark.

cynicism safety sabatoge

About Robert Bly

Portrait of Robert Bly

Robert Elwood Bly (December 23, 1926 – November 21, 2021) was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His best-known prose book is Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and is a...

More quotations from Robert Bly

The dark side of men is clear. Their mad exploitation of earth resources, devaluation and humiliation of women, and obsession with tribal warfare are undeniable. Genetic inheritance contributes to their obsessions, but also culture and environment. We have defective mythologies that ignore masculine depth of feeling, assign men a place in the sky instead of earth, teach obedience to the wrong powers, [and] work to keep men boys.

The images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn-out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man . . . which he received in high school do not work in life.

More quotations tagged with “safety”

Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it's leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn't right or feels unsafe, I really want you to listen and trust in that voice.

—Jennifer Elisabeth

safety change faith trust starting over

Leap, and the net will appear.

—John Burroughs

risk safety possibility

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

—James Baldwin

knowledge safety identity change world

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

—Marcus Aurelius

safety good community individuality belonging

When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

—John Steinbeck

justice wisdom learning intelligence safety gods childhood growth lying parental infallibility