1. Zitate
  2. Autoren
  3. Robert Graves

Robert Graves Zitate
seite 2

Robert Graves, im deutschen Sprachraum Robert von Ranke-Graves , war ein britischer Schriftsteller und Dichter. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. Juli 1895 – 7. Dezember 1985
Robert Graves Foto
Robert Graves: 117   Zitate 0   Gefällt mir

Robert Graves: Zitate auf Englisch

“But old Death, who can't forget,
Waits his time and watches yet,
Waits and watches by the door.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The Cottage".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
Kontext: Through the window I can see
Rooks above the cherry-tree,
Sparrows in the violet bed,
Bramble-bush and bumble-bee,
And old red bracken smoulders still
Among boulders on the hill,
Far too bright to seem quite dead.
But old Death, who can't forget,
Waits his time and watches yet,
Waits and watches by the door.

“Another War soon gets begun,
A dirtier, a more glorious one;
Then, boys, you'll have to play, all in;
It's the cruellest team will win.
So hold your nose against the stink
And never stop too long to think.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The Next War".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
Kontext: Another War soon gets begun,
A dirtier, a more glorious one;
Then, boys, you'll have to play, all in;
It's the cruellest team will win.
So hold your nose against the stink
And never stop too long to think.
Wars don't change except in name;
The next one must go just the same,
And new foul tricks unguessed before
Will win and justify this War.

“Though I am a poor old man
Worth very little,
Yet I suck at my long pipe
At peace in the sun,
I do not fret nor much regret
That my work is done.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

Country Sentiment (1920)
Kontext: I am an old man
With my bones very brittle,
Though I am a poor old man
Worth very little,
Yet I suck at my long pipe
At peace in the sun,
I do not fret nor much regret
That my work is done.

"Brittle Bones".

“The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

Quelle: Claudius the God (1935), Ch. 30.
Kontext: The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.
The frog-pool wanted a king.
Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.
Caligula's chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.
My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent.
I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread.
I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.
Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.
Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.
King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.
By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error.
By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error.
Violent disorders call for violent remedies.
Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log.
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

“Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Symptoms of Love," lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961).
Poems

“Athenodorus used to stroke his beard slowly and rhythmically as he talked, and told me once that it was this that made it grow so luxuriantly. He said that invisible seeds of fire streamed off from his fingers, which were food for the hairs. This was a typical Stoic joke at the expense of Epicurean speculative philosophy.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves buch I, Claudius

Quelle: I, Claudius (1934), Ch. 5.

“All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean —
In scorn of which we sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves buch The White Goddess

"The White Goddess," lines 1–6, from Poems and Satires (1951).
Poems

“Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969).
General sources

“Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice," lines 37–42, from Poems 1938-1945 (1946).
Poems

“Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Mammon" an address at the London School of Economics (6 December 1963); published in Mammon and the Black Goddess (1965).
General sources

“Lovers to-day and for all time
Preserve the meaning of my rhyme:
Love is not kindly nor yet grim
But does to you as you to him.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Advice To Lovers"
Country Sentiment (1920)

“Riding on the shell and shot.
He smites you down, he succours you,
And where you seek him, he is not.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The God Called Poetry".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The Cool Web," lines 9–12, from Poems 1914-1926 (1927).
Poems

“One, two and many: flesh had made him blind,
Flesh had one pleasure only in the act,
Flesh set one purpose only in the mind —
Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find
Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Ulysses," lines 16–20, from Poems 1930-1933 (1933).
Poems

“Professor Edgeworth, of All Souls', avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, Lawrence returned from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate. "Was it very caliginous in the metropolis?""Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated," Lawrence replied gravely.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

Quelle: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 28.

“Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969).
General sources

“New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
Love must ever yet return.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Marigolds".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“They multiplied into the Sirens' throng,
Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast
Hand and foot helpless to the vessel's mast,
Yet would not stop his ears: daring their song
He groaned and sweated till that shore was past.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

Poems

“So when I'm killed, don't wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You'll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you've read.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"When I'm Killed"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark — a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Sick Love," lines 10–12, from Poems 1929.
Poems

“The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

Quelle: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English".

“I protested: "But all this is childish. Is there a war on here, or isn't there?"
"The Royal Welch don't recognize it socially," he answered.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

Quelle: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.14

“Now I begin to know at last,
These nights when I sit down to rhyme,
The form and measure of that vast
God we call Poetry, he who stoops
And leaps me through his paper hoops
A little higher every time.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"The God Called Poetry".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“Hate and Fear are not wanted here,
Nor Toys nor Country Lovers,
Everything they took from my new poem book
But the flyleaf and the covers.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"A First Review"
Country Sentiment (1920)

“Hate 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.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Hate Not, Fear Not".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves buch The Golden Fleece

The Golden Fleece (1944), Invocation.
General sources

“If I were a young man
And young was my Lily,
A smart girl, a bold young man,
Both of us silly.
And though from time before I knew
She'd stab me with pain,
Though well I knew she'd not be true,
I'd love her again.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Brittle Bones".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“It doesn't matter what's the cause,
What wrong they say we're righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we're to do the fighting!”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"To Lucasta on Going to the War — For the Fourth Time"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“If I were a young man
With my bones full of marrow,
Oh, if I were a bold young man
Straight as an arrow,
I'd store up no virtue
For Heaven's distant plain,
I'd live at ease as I did please
And sin once again.”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"Brittle Bones".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“James Burford, collier and fitter, was the oldest soldier of all. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: "Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?" "That's the safety catch. Didn't you do a musketry-course at the depôt?" "No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man, and I spent only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn't have no safety-catch." I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. "In Egypt in 1882," he said. "Weren't you in the South African War?"”

Help us translate this quote
Robert Graves

"I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir... My real age is sixty-three."
Quelle: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.12.

Ähnliche Autoren

Rudyard Kipling Foto
Rudyard Kipling 11
britischer Schriftsteller und Dichter
Paul Claudel Foto
Paul Claudel 2
französischer Schriftsteller, Dichter und Diplomat
André Breton Foto
André Breton 2
Französischer Dichter und Schriftsteller
Christian Morgenstern Foto
Christian Morgenstern 56
deutscher Dichter und Schriftsteller
Boris Leonidowitsch Pasternak Foto
Boris Leonidowitsch Pasternak 9
russischer Dichter und Schriftsteller
William Golding Foto
William Golding 3
britischer Schriftsteller
Douglas Adams Foto
Douglas Adams 66
britischer Schriftsteller
Fernando Pessoa Foto
Fernando Pessoa 24
portugiesischer Dichter und Schriftsteller
Arthur Conan Doyle Foto
Arthur Conan Doyle 36
britischer Arzt und Schriftsteller
Pablo Neruda Foto
Pablo Neruda 37
chilenischer Schriftsteller