Robinson Jeffers Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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

Robinson Jeffers
There is no way to express that explosion; all that exists Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each other into all the sky, new universes Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae like charging spearmen again Invade emptiness. No wonder we are so fascinated with fire-works.

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
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae Rush with the speed of light into empty space.

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
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
I seem to have stood a long time and watched the stars pass. They also shall perish I believe. Here to-day, gone to-morrow, desperate wee galaxies Scattering themselves and shining their substance away Like a passionate thought. It is very well ordered.

Robinson Jeffers
They are animals, as we are. There are many other chemistries of animal life Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino- acids.

Robinson Jeffers
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies, Dust-clouds and nebulae Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one harbor, they stick in one lump.

Robinson Jeffers
When the sun too shall die; the planets will freeze, and the air on them; frozen gases, white flakes of air Will be the dust: which no wind will ever stir: this very dust in dim starlight glistening Is dead wind, the white corpse of wind. Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way, our universe, all the stars that have names are dead.

Robinson Jeffers
The universe is not "a mere clockwork mechanical wonder swinging in a vast vacuum," but is a system that, in the course of time, comes to life.

Robinson Jeffers
Galaxy on galaxy, innumerable swirls of innumerable stars, endured as it were forever and humanity Came into being, its two or three million years are a moment, in a moment it will certainly cease out from being.

Robinson Jeffers
They take horses And give them sicknesses through hollow needles, their blood saves babies: I am here on the mountain making Antitoxin for all the happy towns and farms...

Robinson Jeffers
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom.

Robinson Jeffers
Thinking about the scrap of Mendelian theory Picked up in high-school: blue eyes recessive, brown dominant: Therefore blue-eyed parents cannot produce A dark-eyed child, the dark-eyed-producing element Is lacking in them. If it were present in either, That one would be dark-eyed, for dark eyes are dominant. In Tim Hunt (ed.)

Robinson Jeffers
It was like the glittering night last October When the earth swam through a comet's tail, and fiery serpents Filled half of heaven.

Robinson Jeffers
I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
(An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)

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

Robinson Jeffers
I have grown to believe A stone is a better pillow than many visions.

Robinson Jeffers
Know 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. 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
Pleasure is merely contemptible,
the dangled
Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice.

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

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
At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

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.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River Valley; these four will remain
In the changes of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of the wind.

Robinson Jeffers
Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.

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

Robinson Jeffers
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments: this is the God who does not
care and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness — look at the
tide-stream stars — and the fall of nations — and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley
to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor — I know
not — of faceless violence, the root of all things.

Robinson Jeffers
I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.

Robinson Jeffers