Quotes from Robinson Jeffers

Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

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

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in meOlder and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

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

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

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

Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.

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

You making haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

A little too abstract, a little too wise, It is time for us to kiss the earth again, It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies, Let the rich life run to the roots again.

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

The ghosts . . . try to remember the sunlight. Light has died out of their skies.

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

In pleasant peace and security How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die He shall look up above the stalled oxen Envying the cruel falcon, And dig under the straw for a stone To bruise himself on.

This is my last worst pain, the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.

You making haste haste on decay...

For now I know that whatever bent this world around us, whether it was God or whether it was blind Chance as blind as my father, Is perfectly good, we're given a dollar of life to gamble against a dollar's worth of desire And if we win we have both but losers lose nothing

The flesh of my body Is nothing in my longing. What you think I want Will be pure dust after hundreds of years and something from me be crying to something from you High up in their air.

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

On the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten — Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars —

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine. The fleet limbs of the antelope?

SONG OF QUIETNESS Drink deep, drink deep of quietness, And on the margins of the sea Remember not thine old distress Nor all the miseries to be. Calmer than mists, and cold As they, that fold on fold Up the dim valley are rolled, Learn thou to be.

We don't know enough, we'll never know. Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.