Skip to content

Robinson Jeffers Quotes

1887–1962 United States

John Robinson Jeffers (10 January 1887 – 20 January 1962) was an American poet, whose poetry often presented monist perspectives, transcending personal and particular concerns of human beings, which he eventually labelled as stances of a naturalistic "inhumanism" that he believed was necessary to transcend and diminish many forms of social strife and corruption.

United States
Activists
Environmentalists
Philosophers
Poets

Also known as: Jeffers, Robinson

Random Robinson Jeffers quote

48 quotes

I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

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

At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Love the Wild Swan (1935)

Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful.

The Answer (1936)

Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol.

Contemplation of The Sword (1938)

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.

This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.

Love the Wild Swan (1935)

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

The Purse-Seine (1937)

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.

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.

The Silent Shepherds (1958)

Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

The Answer (1936)

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.

The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

Be Angry At The Sun (1941)

An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.

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

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

Meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.

Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach
We built our house when I and my love were young.

Vast is the night. How you have grown, dear night,
walking your empty halls, how tall!

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robinson Jeffers (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.