Robinson Jeffers Quotes

The future is ever a misted landscape, no man foreknows it.

Robinson Jeffers (Prescription of Painful Ends)

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

Robinson Jeffers (The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean, 1940)

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Robinson Jeffers (New Mexican Mountain)

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

Robinson Jeffers (Shine, Republic)

We might remember... not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

Robinson Jeffers (Original Sin)

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

Robinson Jeffers (Promise of Peace)

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers (The Answer)

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

Robinson Jeffers (The Purse-Seine, 1937)

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

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 (Cawdor)

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

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 (Love the Wild Swan)

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

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

And why do you cry, my dear, why do you cry?
It is all in the whirling circles of time. 
If millions are born millions must die.

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

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

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

If civilization goes down, that
Would be an event to contemplate. 
It will not be in our time, alas, my dear,
It will not be in our time.

Robinson Jeffers

The ghosts of the tribe
Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to
Remember the sunlight,
Light has died out of their skies.

Robinson Jeffers (Apology for Bad Dreams)

What are we,
The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips 
And little hair, to think we should always be fed,
Sheltered, intact, and self-controlled?

Robinson Jeffers (Apology for Bad Dreams)

I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic 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 (Letter to Sister Mary Power, 1934)

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 (Road Stallion)

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

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 (Continent's End)

And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passio  nately
Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward
The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg.

Robinson Jeffers (Night)

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 (The Silent Shepherds)

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 (A Hill-Top View)

Robinson Jeffers Biography

Born: January 10, 1887
Died: January 20, 1962

Robinson Jeffers was an American poet. He is best known for his environmentalism and for his work about the central California coast.

Notable Works

Flagons and Apples (1912)
Solstice and Other Poems. (1935)
Be Angry at the Sun (1941)
The Double Axe and Other Poems. (1948)