Quotes from Robinson Jeffers

I would burn my right hand in a slow fire To change the future . . . I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Sad sons of the stormy fall, No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside, Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds, Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain, But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

The beauty of things means virtue and value in them It is in the beholder's eye, not the worlds? Certainly. It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means the world is sound.

Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among the leaves and his hounds tore him A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much.

for a poem Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

The omnisecular spirit keeps the old with the new also. Nothing at all has suffered erasure. There is life not of our time. He calls ungainly bodies As beautiful as the grace of horses. He is weary of nothing; he watches air-planes; he watches pelicans.

I wish the little rivers under the laughing kingfishers in every canyon were fire, and the ocean Fire, and my heart not afraid to go down.

By God, if you go killing Unhappiness who'll be left in the houses?

I think . . . I think says the brain . . . But the little spire with the eyes of ecstasy On the brain's dome is the life, Not thinking anything, But flaming . . . little fool you will cease Flaming when you flame up to peace.

This is the essence of tragedy, To have meant well and made woe, and watch Fate, All stone, approach.

poetry cannot speak without remembering the turns of the sun and moon, and the rhythm of the ocean, and the recurrence of human generations, the returning waves of life and death.

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

Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend youThe wings of the future, for I have them.

Seagulls... slim yachts of the element.

...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.

As for me, I would ratherBe a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracyAnd the dogs that talk revolution,Drunk with talk, liars and believers.I believe in my tusks.Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"Said the gamey black-maned wild boarTusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

...[K]now that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe....

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.

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

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

I have grown to believeA stone is a better pillow than many visions.

The deep dark-shiningPacific leans on the land,Feeling his cold strengthTo the outmost margins.

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