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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

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

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.

Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean (1940)

O that our souls could scale a height like this,
A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak
Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak
Above the blinding clouds of prejudice,
Would we could see all truly as it is;
The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.

A Hill-Top View (1904)

I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him.

Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.

Love the Wild Swan (1935)

These are real and we see their beauty.

All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human.

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.

The Silent Shepherds (1958)

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

I don't think industrial civilization is worth the distortion of human nature and the meanness and the loss of contact with the earth that it entails.

Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotions that I did not feel.

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.

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.

You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win.

This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say —
God, when he walked on earth.

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.

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.

Attribution

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