Robert Frost Quotes

Robert Frost

Biography

Type: Poet, Playwright

Born: March 26, 1874,San Francisco, California,

Died: January 29, 1963 (aged 88), Boston, Mass

A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, American Robert Lee Frost depicted realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the common man.

Robert Frost Quotes

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.. Robert Frost
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

We love the things we love for what they are.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

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

These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

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.

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

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

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully 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.

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

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

They would not find me changed from him they knew - Only more sure of all I thought was true.

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

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

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.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

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.

We ran as if to meet the moon.

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

I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

Fireflies in the Garden
By Robert Frost 1874–1963

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

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

Nor is there wanting in the press
Some spirit to stand simply forth,
Heroic in it nakedness,
Against the uttermost of earth.
The tale of earth's unhonored things
Sounds nobler there than 'neath the sun;
And the mind whirls and the heart sings,
And a shout greets the daring one.

I could give all to Time except - except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

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.

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.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves.

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

There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.

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

Freedom lies in being bold.

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.

Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent.

But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past.
The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing -
Too present to imagine.

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