Quotes by Robert Frost

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

The only way around is through.

Butterflies... flowers that fly and all but sing.

Freedom lies in bold action.

The only way out is through.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

I go to school the youth to learn the future.

Than smoke and mist who better could appraise, the kindred spirit of an inner haze?

These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and put them in their place.

You've got to love what's loveable, and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that is the wife who can't cook and will.

A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look.

Depression occurs when one looks back with no pride, and looks forward with no hope.

When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.

Families break up when people take hints you don't intend and miss hints you do intend.

There never was any harm truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

A man will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body -- the wishbone.

No, in country money, the country scale of gain, The requisite lift of spirit has never been found.

Love at the lips was touch as sweet as I could bear.

Good fences make good neighbours.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Would pay in cities for good trees like those, Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools Could hang enough on to pick off enough. A thousand Christmas trees I didn't know I had!

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be. She loves the bare, the withered tree, She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing.

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.

Thinking isn't to agree or disagree-that's voting.

O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

Our lives laid down in war and peace may not
Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight.
And that they may be is the only prayer
Worth praying. May my sacrifice
Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight.

Don't be an agnostic. Be something.

I never feel more at home than at a ballgame.

War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn't going to tell you and I mustn't.
The best way is to come uphill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.

The first thing I do in any town I come to is ask if it has a bookstore.

The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

Nature is cruel; it's man whose is sick of blood -- and man doesn't seem so very sick of it.

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean-
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.

Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.

Of all crimes the worst
Is to steal the glory
From the great and brave,
Even more accursed
Than to rob the grave.

Let's get my incantation right:
I wish I may, I wish I might
Give earth another satellite.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Lord, I have loved Your sky,
Be it said against or for me,
Have loved it clear and high,
Or low and stormy.

But this we know, the obstacle that checked
And tripped the body, shot the spirit on
Further than target ever showed or shone.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves.

For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true?
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

I play better tennis because the court is there.

I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.

Man that is of woman born is apt to be as vain has his mother.

The chance is the remotest, Of its going much longer unnoticed, That I'm not keeping pace With the headlong human race.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been -- alone, As all must be, I said within my heart, Whether they work together or apart.

There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man -fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut of from them.

Diplomacy, n : 1. The patriotic art of lying for one's country. 2. The art of letting someone have your way. 3. The art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a rock. A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

A definite purpose, like blinders on a horse, inevitably narrows its possessor's point of view.

It's God -- I recognised him from Blake's picture.

An idea is a feat of association.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

If you're looking for something to be brave about, consider fine arts.

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.

Come grow old with me, for the best is yet to come!

Have I not walked without an upward look Of caution under stars that very well Might not have missed me when they shot and fell? It was a risk I had to take-and took.

People are inexterminable -- like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices -- that's us.

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true.

I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend ... asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.

Both T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist.

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.

Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.

The sidelong glance is what you depend on.

Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.

What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

Nations like the Cuban and the Swiss
Can never hope to wage a Global Mission.
No Holy Wars for them. The most the small
Can ever give us is a nuisance brawl.

I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.

When I see birches bend to left and right... I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

You know how cunningly mankind is planned:
We have one loving and one hating hand.
The loving's made to hold each other like,
While with the hating other hand we strike.

I heard someone say he Carl Sandburg was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

To Time it never seems that he is brave

To set himself against the peaks of snow

To lay them level with the running wave,

Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,

But only grave, contemplative and grave.

Only God and I knew what I meant when I wrote it, now only God knows.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.

Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other's business.

There is little much beyond the grave, but the strong are saying nothing until they see.

As for his evil tidings,
Belshazzar's overthrow,
Why hurry to tell Belshazzar
What soon enough he would know?

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate an's and ifs.

I am sure I have heard this several times from places I can't recall, but it's not already in the Gaia Quotes database, so I add this profound insight from the fields of psychological healing and spiritual evolution. It sure has helped me.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orch-ard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting... Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Let those possess the land, and only those,
Who love it with a love so strong and stupid
That they may be abused and taken advantage of
And made fun of by business, law, and art.

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round, And only by one's going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went- Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.

Suddenly, quietly, you realize that -- from this moment forth -- you will no longer walk through this life alone. Like a new sun this awareness arises within you, freeing you from fear, opening your life. It is the beginning of love, and the end of all that came before.

Lovers, forget your love And list to the love of these She a window flower And he a winter breeze.

I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some say when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on, I shall have less to say, But I shall be none.

Live and let live, believe and let believe.
'Twas said the lesser gods were only traits
Of the one awful God. Just so the saints
Are God's white light refracted into colors.

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.

The footpath down to the well is healed.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. -- W. H. Auden
A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Courage is the human virtue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, and wants it down.

New is a word for fools in towns who think
Style upon style in dress and thought at last
Must get somewhere.

What makes a nation in the beginning is a good piece of geography.

Nature's never quite
Sure she hasn't erred
In her vague design.

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose -
But were always a rose.

The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'
Ah, when tot the heart of man
Was it ever less than a teason
to go with the drift of things,
to yield with a grace to reason,
and bow and accept and accept the end
of a love or a season?

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation.

It was far in the sameness of the wood;
I was running with joy on the Demon's trail,
Though I knew what I hunted was no true god.

At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, The road is forlorn all day, Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, And the hoof-prints vanish away. The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee, Expend their bloom in vain. Come over the hills and far with me, And be my love in the rain.

We disparage reason.
But all the time it's what we're most concerned with.
There's will as motor and there's will as brakes.
Reason is, I suppose, the steering gear.

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
If the trees must, let them silently toss.

The difference between a man and his valet: they both smoke the same cigars, but only one pays for them.

God once declared He was true
And then took the veil and withdrew.

But not gold in commercial quantities, Just enough gold to make the engagement rings And marriage rings of those who owned the farm. What gold more innocent could one have asked for?

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods.

Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away.

I'm not a teacher, but an awakener.

It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.

If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.

The rain to the wind said,
You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged -- though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

One of the hardest things in life to accept is a called third strike.

Nature's first green is gold.

How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?

The rose is a rose, And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes That the apple's a rose.

You, of course, are a rose -- But were always a rose.

So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

A Late Walk -
A Tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
comes softly rattling down.
I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
to carry again to you.

The beauty of enmity is insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security.

Good fences make good neighbors.

Writing a poem is discovering.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body -- the wishbone.

Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.
I have to be gone for a season or so.

What is this?
This life?
Our sitting here by lanternlight together
Amid the wreckage of a former home?
You won't deny the lantern isn't new.
The stove is not, and you are not to me,
Nor I to you.

They are that that talks of going
But never gets away.

Nor is there wanting in the press
Some spirit to stand simply forth,
Heroic in it nakedness,
Against the uttermost of earth.
The tale of earth's unhonored things
Sounds nobler there than 'neath the sun;
And the mind whirls and the heart sings,
And a shout greets the daring one.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We ran as if to meet the moon.

'Warm in December, cold in June, you say?'

I don't suppose the water's changed at all.

You and I know enough to know it's warm

Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.

But all the fun's in how you say a thing.

The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight; New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil.

Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent.

By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father s. He's more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Out alone in the winter rain, Intent on giving and taking pain.

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill You know how it is with an April day.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book for everything.

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

The middle of the road is where the white line is -- and that's the worst place to drive.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

I always entertain great hopes.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

The only certain freedom's in departure.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

You can't get too much winter in the winter.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.