Robinson Jeffers Quotes & Sayings

#1. Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

Robinson Jeffers

#2. Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

Robinson Jeffers

#3. Truly men hate the truth; they'd liefer meet a tiger on the road.

Robinson Jeffers

#4. O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.

Robinson Jeffers

#5. Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.

Robinson Jeffers

#6. I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.

Robinson Jeffers

#7. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.

Robinson Jeffers

#8. You making haste haste on decay ...

Robinson Jeffers

#9. Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.

Robinson Jeffers

#10. Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

Robinson Jeffers

#11. To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand years
Will Hardly leach," he thought, "this dust of that fire.

Robinson Jeffers

#12. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

Robinson Jeffers

#13. Oh heavy change. The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.

Robinson Jeffers

#14. Perhaps we desire death / or why is poison so sweet? / why do little Sirens make kindlier music / for a man caught in the net of the world between news-cast & work-desk?

Robinson Jeffers

#15. There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

Robinson Jeffers

#16. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars
If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond them Were that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears.

Robinson Jeffers

#17. I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.

Robinson Jeffers

#18. I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

Robinson Jeffers

#19. Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers

#20. They import and they consume reality.

Robinson Jeffers

#21. As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

Robinson Jeffers

#22. In pleasant peace and security
How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die
He shall look up above the stalled oxen
Envying the cruel falcon,
And dig under the straw for a stone
To bruise himself on.

Robinson Jeffers

#23. Meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.

Robinson Jeffers

#24. The heads of strong old age are beautiful beyond all grace of youth.

Robinson Jeffers

#25. Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth.

Robinson Jeffers

#26. A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.

Robinson Jeffers

#27. We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.

Robinson Jeffers

#28. Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

Robinson Jeffers

#29. If millions are born millions must die.

Robinson Jeffers

#30. It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.

Robinson Jeffers

#31. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

Robinson Jeffers

#32. Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.

Robinson Jeffers

#33. Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful ...
... the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

Robinson Jeffers

#34. This is my last worst pain,
the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.

Robinson Jeffers

#35. Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

Robinson Jeffers

#36. Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.

Robinson Jeffers

#37. Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions.

Robinson Jeffers

#38. Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed

Robinson Jeffers

#39. Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy and the dogs that talk revolution, drunk with talk, liars and believers. I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies, said the gamey black-maned wild boar tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

Robinson Jeffers

#40. Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted.

Robinson Jeffers

#41. The tides are in our veins.

Robinson Jeffers

#42. One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea's cold flow
And man's dark soul.

Robinson Jeffers

#43. The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.

Robinson Jeffers

#44. Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.

Robinson Jeffers

#45. And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to
prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
You did not say "en masse," you said "independence." But we
cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

Robinson Jeffers

#46. The world's in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean.

Robinson Jeffers

#47. The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

Robinson Jeffers

#48. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

Robinson Jeffers

#49. We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Robinson Jeffers