Top 40 Robinson Jeffers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.”

— Robinson Jeffers

2. “I’ve changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run 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.”

— Robinson Jeffers

3. “Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Robinson Jeffers

6. “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

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

— Robinson Jeffers

8. “God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars – If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond them Were that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

10. “Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.”

— Robinson Jeffers

11. “The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.”

— Robinson Jeffers

12. “If millions are born millions must die.”

— Robinson Jeffers

13. “Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful.”

— Robinson Jeffers

14. “Truly men hate the truth; they’d liefer meet a tiger on the road.”

— Robinson Jeffers

15. “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.”

— Robinson Jeffers

16. “Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.”

— Robinson Jeffers

17. “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

18. “That public men publish falsehoods Is 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 things anger you.”

— Robinson Jeffers

19. “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.”

— Robinson Jeffers

20. “Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers’s, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry.”

— Robinson Jeffers

21. “The world’s in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean.”

— Robinson Jeffers

22. “What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine. The fleet limbs of the antelope?”

— Robinson Jeffers

23. “The tides are in our veins.”

— Robinson Jeffers

24. “As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

26. “I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

28. “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.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

31. “This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

Featured in: Strong Quotes

34. “O that our souls could scale a height like this, A mighty mountain swept o’er by the bleak Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak Above the blinding clouds of prejudice, Would we could see all truly as it is; The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.”

— Robinson Jeffers

35. “Oh heavy change. The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.”

— Robinson Jeffers

36. “They import and they consume reality.”

— Robinson Jeffers

37. “Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed.”

— Robinson Jeffers

38. “The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.”

— Robinson Jeffers

39. “Old violence is not too old to beget new values.”

— Robinson Jeffers

40. “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

— Robinson Jeffers

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

— Robinson Jeffers

42. “Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions.”

— Robinson Jeffers

43. “No one but death the redeemer will humble that head.”

— Robinson Jeffers