Robinson Jeffers - Stars Quotes

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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
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
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
I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have lunatics
For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
The country news into supernaturalism —
For all men to such minds are devils or gods — and that increases
Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.

Robinson Jeffers
Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.

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
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
We know the stars, hotter and more fatal than earth; we have learned lately the fire-wheel galaxies, Infinite in number or all but infinite, among which our great sun's galaxy's Flight is as a gnat's, one grain of sand in the Sahara: it is necessary to stretch our minds To these dimensions.

Robinson Jeffers
It seemed to Barclay the cloud broke and he saw the stars, Those of this swarm were many, but beyond them universe past universe Flared to infinity, no end conceivable. Alien, alien, alien universes.

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

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
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
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
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
There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man, His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance: let him count the star-swirls.

Robinson Jeffers
The learned astronomer Analyzing the light of most remote star-swirls Has found them — or a trick of distance deludes his prism — All at incredible speeds fleeing outward from ours. I thought, no doubt they are fleeing the contagion Of consciousness that infects this corner of space.

Robinson Jeffers