Robert Frost Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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'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
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

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

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
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
A man must partly give up being a man
With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement
By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you're a-mind to name.
Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.
Two that don't love can't live together without them.
But two that do can't live together with them."
She moved the latch a little. "Don't — don't go.
Don't carry it to someone else this time.
Tell me about it if it's something human.
Let me into your grief. I'm not so much
Unlike other folks as your standing there
Apart would make me out. Give me my chance.

Robert Frost
Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Robert Frost
I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there
At least not over half.

Robert Frost
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.

Robert Frost
"New order of the ages" did they say?
If it looks none too orderly today,
'Tis a confusion it was ours to start
So in it have to take courageous part.
No one of honest feeling would approve
A ruler who pretended not to love
A turbulence he had the better of.

Robert Frost
Keep cold, young orchard. Goodbye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.

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

Robert Frost
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Robert Frost
He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Robert Frost
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

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
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.

Robert Frost
I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart

Robert Frost
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout And be my love in the rain.

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
And then we saw him bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray,
Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes.

Robert Frost
She drew back; he was calm
"It is this that had the power,"
And he lashed his open palm
With the tender-headed flower.

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

Robert Frost
The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;
New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil.

Robert Frost
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it…

Robert Frost
It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching.

Robert Frost