Robert Frost Quotes

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true

We're either nothing or a God's regret.

It's hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it, and what's in between doesn't make much sense.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

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

Writing a poem is discovering.

I cut my own hair. I got sick of barbers because they talk too much. And too much of their talk was about my hair coming out.

Ants are a curious race

He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 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.

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

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

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.

The Master Speed No speed of wind or water rushing by but you have speed far greater. You can climb back up a stream of radiance to the sky, and back through history up the stream of time. And you were given this swiftness, not for haste nor chiefly that you may go where you will, but in the rush of everything to waste, that you may have the power of standing still-- off any still or moving thing you say. Two such as you with such a master speed From one another once you are agreed that life is only life forevermore together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

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

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.

Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth.

To be social is to be forgiving.

Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

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

Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.

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

Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

There's nothing I'm afraid of like scared people.

What makes a nation in the beginning is a good piece of geography.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, and wants it down.

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

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.

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.

The people I want to hear about are the people who take risks.

Any eye is an evil eye That looks in on to a mood apart.

As it is more blessed to receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.

Fortunately, we don't need to know how bad an age is. There is something we can always be doing without reference to how good or bad the age is.

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.

Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too."

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

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

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

Have I not walked without an upward look Of caution under stars that very well Might not have missed me when they shot and fell? It was a risk I had to take-and took.