Robinson Jeffers Quotes & Sayings

If millions are born millions must die. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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. — Robinson Jeffers

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

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions. — Robinson Jeffers

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

You have perhaps heard some false reports
On the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten
Successfully. 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
And where is the German Reich? There also
Will be prodigious America and world-owning China. I say that all hopes and empires will die like yours;
Mankind will die, there will be no more fools; wisdom will die; the very stars will die;
One fierce life lasts. — Robinson Jeffers

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-ered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain ... — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

They import and they consume reality. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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

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

The tides are in our veins. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

Civilization is a transient sickness. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed
Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe
In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed
In a million years: but the race of man was made
By shock and agony ...
... a wound was made in the brain
When life became too hard, and has never healed.
It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-
sacrifice,
It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter
men,
And hate the world. — Robinson Jeffers

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

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. — Robinson Jeffers

I have heard the summer dust crying to be born. — Robinson Jeffers

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

You making haste haste on decay ... — Robinson Jeffers

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

Seagulls ... slim yachts of the element. — Robinson Jeffers

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. — Robinson Jeffers

Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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

The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man. — Robinson Jeffers

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. — Robinson Jeffers

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

Oh heavy change. The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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. Watch the wheel slope and tum.
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors,
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not CatulIus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatredS.

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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

Love The Wild Swan
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
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.
This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your ... self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan. — Robinson Jeffers

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies. — Robinson Jeffers

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

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

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

They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths to
dream of, rose-marble-fingered
Women shed light down the great lines;
But you have invoked the slime in the skull,
The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Gods
like racial dreams, the woman's desire,
The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothing
Human seems happy at the feet of yours.
Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in the gray old
years in the evening leaning
Over the gray stones of the tower-top,
You shall be called heartless and blind. — Robinson Jeffers

This is my last worst pain,
the bitter enlightenment that buys peace. — Robinson Jeffers