Browse quotations by Richard Jefferies with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Focused collections bring together quotations from this author around one recurring idea.
“I think of the drift of time”
Seasonal change prompts Jefferies to experience time as movement visible in buds, flowers and remembered observation, linking temporal awareness to close attention to the natural world.
Source note: Field and Hedgerow, in the essay “Hours of Spring”; Project Gutenberg #7030. The book was collected posthumously by Jefferies’s widow, so individual essays may predate the 1889 volume.
“The gap of time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me”
Jefferies describes memory resisting elapsed time: the remembered person remains vivid even though years have passed and death has created an irreversible break in the present.
Source note: Field and Hedgerow; Project Gutenberg #7030. The sentence occurs in a recollection of John Brown after his death and is kept in that personal-memory context rather than generalized into abstract grief advice.
“The first stroll of the year should be taken in Claygate Lane.”
Jefferies treats the year as a sequence of observable natural opportunities, tying a particular walk to the first spring signs rather than treating seasonal time as an abstract calendar alone.
Source note: Nature Near London, “Woodlands”; Project Gutenberg #18629. The recommendation is literary nature writing rooted in Jefferies’s local seasonal observation, not contemporary travel guidance.
“as the spring began, came crowds of chiffchaffs and willow-wrens”
The arrival of birds marks spring through recurring natural events, showing how Jefferies reads time through seasonal change and attention rather than through dates alone.
Source note: Nature Near London, preface; Project Gutenberg #18629. The excerpt records Jefferies’s observation near London and serves as seasonal evidence, not a universal phenology schedule for present-day readers.
“It is eternity now.”
Jefferies collapses ordinary chronological distinctions into an intensely experienced present, describing the current moment as participation in eternity rather than a point merely passing toward the future.
Source note: The Story of My Heart, Chapter I; Project Gutenberg #2317. This is Jefferies’s speculative spiritual autobiography and the statement is philosophical-poetic, not a scientific theory of time.
“Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.”
The repeated ‘now’ intensifies Jefferies’s claim that spiritual significance is experienced in the present rather than postponed to a distant future or afterlife.
Source note: The Story of My Heart, Chapter I; Project Gutenberg #2317. Jefferies is articulating a personal metaphysical intuition, so the source note preserves its spiritual and literary character.