Quotes from Robinson Jeffers

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed In a million years: but the race of man was made By shock and agony… … a wound was made in the brain When life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood- sacrifice, It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, And hate the world.

No one but death the redeemer will humble that head.

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

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

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.

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

The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.

Truly men hate the truth; they'd liefer meet a tiger on the road.

Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.

The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.

...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 should for a moment touch truth.

The heads of strong old age are beautiful beyond all grace of youth.

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

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

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

We might remember ... not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.