Quotes by Robert Frost
Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Robert Frost. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime and is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution." He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont.
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.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
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.
As I sit here, and often times, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
-- -- from "The Black Cottage.

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

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.

An idea is a feat of association.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life -- not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

Nature's first green is gold.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

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.

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.

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.