Robinson Jeffers Quotes

Seagulls . . . slim yachts of the element.

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

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.

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

You making haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

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

I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy... parts of one organic whole.... (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.

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.

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

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

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.

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions.

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

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

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.

The tides are in our veins.

That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you.

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

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.

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.

It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits.

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

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.

Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

[K]now that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.

...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.

This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.

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

civilization is a transient sickness.

Shiva... is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan; The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things. Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, Empty darkness under the death-tent wings. She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch a new brood, Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.

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

The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.

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

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.

Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

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.

I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful.

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

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.

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.

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.

They import and they consume reality.

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.

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

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

If millions are born millions must die.

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils. Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

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

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