Quotes by Robinson Jeffers

“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.”

“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.”

“What is this thing called life? I believeThat the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,Only we do not call it so--I speak of the lifeThat...”

“You have perhaps heard some false reportsOn 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 ...”

“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.”

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

“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, ...”

“That public men publish falsehoodsIs 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 thi...”

“The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth”

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

“We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.”

“They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths todream of, rose-marble-fingeredWomen shed light down the great lines;But you have invoked the slime in the skull,The lymph in the vessels. They hav...”

“I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fo...”

“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.”

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling re...”

“Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.”

“To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach, he thought, this dust of that fire.”

“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.”

“To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.”