Robinson Jeffers - Life Quotes

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

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

Robinson Jeffers
I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;
Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

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
The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun's eye on the tideline. It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.

Robinson Jeffers
Howard felt a sudden increase of force and life in his mind, like a transfusion Of strong red blood, he thought "The faithful adrenals Have just heard how near death I am."

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
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