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

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.

Be Angry At The Sun (1941)

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...

The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean (1940)

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.

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.

Contemplation of The Sword (1938)

I hate my verses, every line, every word.
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.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

Love the Wild Swan (1935)

Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

I suppose the desire for publication is a normal part of the instinct for writing... the writer sits at home, and the mere fact of being printed provides his verses with a kind of audience... So, having his vanity partially satisfied, he can go ahead and try better work.

Letter to a group of Occidental College students (1955)

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.

Attribution

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