Robert Frost Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.

Robert Frost
All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like god in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.

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

Robert Frost
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Robert Frost
My object is living is to unite
My avocation with my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.

Robert Frost
I have remained resentful to this day
When any but myself presumed to say
That there was anything I couldn't be.

Robert Frost
God nodded his approval of as good.
So much those heroes knew and understood,
I mean the great four, Washington,
John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison
So much they saw as consecrated seers
They must have seen ahead what not appears,
They would bring empires down about our ears
And by the example of our Declaration
Make everybody want to be a nation.

Robert Frost
Courage is of the heart by derivation,
And great it is. But fear is of the soul.

Robert Frost
For I have had too much Of apple-picking:I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Robert Frost
The mind-is not the heart. I may yet live, as I know others live, To wish in vain to let go with the mind- Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me That I need learn to let go with the heart.

Robert Frost
"Don't let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. But the hand was gone already.

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

Robert Frost
The rose is a rose, And was always a rose. But now the theory 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.

Robert Frost
For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius
By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery.

Robert Frost
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Robert Frost
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?

Robert Frost
When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don't feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing. … You must have form — performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism — for the New Republic.

Robert Frost
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.

Robert Frost
Men work together, I told him from the heart,
Whether they work together or apart.

Robert Frost
The great Overdog, That heavenly beast With a star in one eye, Gives a leap in the east. He dances upright All the way to the west And never once drops On his forefeet to rest. I'm a poor underdog, But tonight I will bark With the great Overdog That romps through the dark.

Robert Frost
The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended — and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

Robert Frost
Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent.

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

Robert Frost
Will the blight end the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not. It keeps smoldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another parasite Shall come to end the blight.

Robert Frost