Robinson Jeffers quotes

Robinson Jeffers was an American poet and playwright renowned for his powerful verse about the California coast and wild nature. His work often explores themes of inhumanism, blending human experience with the vastness of the natural world. He remains a significant figure in 20th-century American literature, admired for his unique voice and environmental vision. Here are 69 of his quotes:

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain...

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

Robinson Jeffers

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.

Robinson Jeffers

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught - they say - God, when he walked on earth.

Robinson Jeffers

Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach We built our house when I and my love were young.

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

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

Robinson Jeffers

I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotions that I did not feel.

Robinson Jeffers

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Robinson Jeffers

The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth Hunts in no pack.

Robinson Jeffers

At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

Robinson Jeffers