Robert Frost Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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

Robert Frost
A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.

Robert Frost
The sister's face
Fell all in wrinkles of responsibility.
She wanted to do right. She'd have to think.

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

Robert Frost
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.

Robert Frost
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing 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.

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

Robert Frost
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad.

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

Robert Frost
Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold.'

Robert Frost
I own any form of humor shows fear and inferiority. Irony is simply a kind of guardedness. So is a twinkle. It keeps the reader from criticism. Whittier, when he shows any style at all is probably a greater person than Longfellow as he is lifted priestlike above consideration of the scornful. Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody's doubt whatsoever. 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 this side of the standing argument. Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

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

Robert Frost
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.

Robert Frost
Well, who begun it?
That's what at the end of a war
We always say not who won it,
Or what it was foughten for.

Robert Frost
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.

Robert Frost
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.

Robert Frost
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost
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.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future's sakes.

Robert Frost
The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

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

Robert Frost
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long. — You come too.

Robert Frost
Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave,
But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.
There may be little or much beyond the grave,
But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

Robert Frost
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Robert Frost
I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Robert Frost
She's one of the two best states in the Union.
Vermont's the other.
Frost came from Vermont

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

Robert Frost
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: "What is it you see
From up there always?—for I want to know."

Robert Frost
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good
neighbors."

Robert Frost
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.

Robert Frost
On picking blueberries: It's a nice way to live,
Just taking what Nature is willing to give,
Not forcing her hand with harrow and plow.

Robert Frost