Robert Frost Quotes

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

But what would interest you about the brook,It's always cold in summer, warm in winter.

The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

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

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

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

Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.

Haven't you heard, though,About the ships where war has found them outAt sea, about the towns where war has comeThrough opening clouds at night with droning speedFurther o'erhead than all but stars and angelsAnd children in the ships and in the towns?

... 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 meAnd have our fire and laugh and be afraid.

It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.

Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun. It is this backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source. It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us.

There is much in nature against us. But we forget:Take nature altogether since time began,Including human nature, in peace and war,And it must be a little more in favor of man.

If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.

Everyone asks for freedom for himself,The man free love, the businessman free trade,The writer and talker free speech and free press.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

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

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

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

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

Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only middles.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You're one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, a cloud come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.

How are we to writeThe Russian novel in AmericaAs long as life goes so unterribly?

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

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.

I see for Nature no defeatIn one tree's overthrowOr for myself in my retreatFor yet another blow.

Loyalty is that for the lack of which your gang will shoot you without benefit of trial by jury.

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people.

He says the best way out is always through. / And I can agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through

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

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

What are we? Young or new? We must be something.

Freedom lies in being bold.

The truly educated can listen to any view without losing their temper or self-confidence.

A bird half wakened in the lunar noonSang halfway through its little inborn tune.

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

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a treeToward heaven still,And there's a barrel that I didn't fillBeside it, and there may be two or threeApples I didn't pick upon some bough.But I am done with apple-picking now.Essence of winter sleep is on the night,The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

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

When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.

If there is one thing in life that I have learned about life it is... it goes on.

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

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

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.

I dwell in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago.

What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.

Affection is an overpowering craving to be compellingly sought.

Good fences make good neighbors.

The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed and while I am making up my bed I am making up my mind as to what kind of a day I am going to have.

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.

Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?

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

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.

Before now poetry has taken noticeOf wars, and what are wars but politicsTransformed from chronic to acute and bloody?

'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 warmCompared with cold, and cold compared with warm.But all the fun's in how you say a thing.

I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.

Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right.

Nature's never quiteSure she hasn't erredIn her vague design.