Robinson Jeffers Quotes
The future is ever a misted landscape, no man foreknows it.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.
Civilization is a transient sickness.
The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.
We might remember... not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.
The heads of strong old age are beautiful beyond all grace of youth.
Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.
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.
The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.
Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.