Robert Frost Quotes

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

It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage.

I'm always saying something that's just the edge of something more.

Our very life depends on everything's Recurring till we answer from within.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

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

Freedom is when you are easy in the harness.

Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right.

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.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

The test is always how we treat the poor.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people.

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.

An idea is a feat of association.

So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid.

GATHERING LEAVES Spades take up leaves No better than spoons, And bags full of leaves Are light as balloons. I make a great noise Of rustling all day Like rabbit and deer Running away. But the mountains I raise Elude my embrace, Flowing over my arms And into my face. I may load and unload Again and again Till I fill the whole shed, And what have I then? Next to nothing for weight, And since they grew duller From contact with earth, Next to nothing for color. Next to nothing for use. But a crop is a crop, And who's to say where The harvest shall stop?

I hate the idea that you ought to read the whole of anybody.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You're one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, a cloud come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

The people I am most afraid of are those who are the most afraid.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

Come grow old with me, for the best is yet to come!

Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes Is the deed ever truly done For Heaven and the future's sakes

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.

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

I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there.

One aged man - one man - can't fill a house.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspectthey differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.

I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

He burned his house down for the fire insurance and spent the proceeds on a telescope.

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

I am one who has been acquainted with the night

The difference between a man and his valet: they both smoke the same cigars, but only one pays for them.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.

What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.

I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.

Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The footpath down to the well is healed.