Robinson Jeffers

Seagulls . . . slim yachts of the element.

— Robinson Jeffers

It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.

— Robinson Jeffers

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

— Robinson Jeffers

“You making haste haste on decay...”

— Robinson Jeffers

The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.

— Robinson Jeffers

They import and they consume reality.

— Robinson Jeffers

civilization is a transient sickness.

— Robinson Jeffers

The tides are in our veins.

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

“To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand years Will Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted.

— 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

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

— Robinson Jeffers

“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean…

— Robinson Jeffers

Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess,…

— Robinson Jeffers

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine The fleet limbs of the antelope? What but fear winged the birds, and hunger…

— 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

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is…

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom. You did not…

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for…

— Robinson Jeffers

O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven;…

— Robinson Jeffers

“I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it…

— Robinson Jeffers

As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what…

— Robinson Jeffers

I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat…

— Robinson Jeffers

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet,…

— Robinson Jeffers

It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom,…

— Robinson Jeffers

...Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion…

— Robinson Jeffers

“The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean, The blue pool in the old garden, More than five thousand years has…

— Robinson Jeffers

“Never blame the man: his hard-pressed Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe In the great southern rain-forest and hardly…

— Robinson Jeffers

I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy... parts of one organic…

— Robinson Jeffers

“That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known…

— Robinson Jeffers

“The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to…

— Robinson Jeffers

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the…

— Robinson Jeffers

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I And protest, only a bubble in the…

— Robinson Jeffers

Why does insanity always twist the great answers? Because only tormented persons want truth. Man is an animal like other animals, wants…

— Robinson Jeffers