Robert Frost Quotes

“The footpath down to the well is healed.”

“I go to school the youth to learn the future.”

“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.”

“People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.”

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

“Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.”

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

“More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work.”

“When work becomes play, and play becomes your work, your life unfolds.”

“Ants are a curious race”

“Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.”

“I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

“The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”

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

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

“I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.”

“What is this talked-of mystery of birth. But being mounted bareback on the earth?”

“An idea comes as near to something for nothing as you can get.”

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

“Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial, but not everything commercial is honest.”

“All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.”

“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?”

“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.”

“The sister's faceFell all in wrinkles of responsibility.She wanted to do right. She'd have to think.”

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