Robert Frost Quotes - Page 2

An idea is a feat of association and the height of it is a good metaphor.

God made a beauteous garden With lovely flowers strown,But one straight, narrow pathway That was not overgrown.And to this beauteous garden He brought mankind to live,And said "To you, my children, These lovely flowers I give.Prune ye my vines and fig trees, With care my flowers tend,But keep the pathway open Your home is at the end."God's Garden

The only way round is through.

You've got to love what's lovable and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

The Road Not TakenTwo roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothtAnd be one traveler, long I stoodtAnd looked down one as far as I couldtTo where it bent in the undergrowth;t Then took the other, as just as fair,tAnd having perhaps the better claim,tBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;tThough as for that the passing theretHad worn them really about the same,t And both that morning equally laytIn leaves no step had trodden black.tOh, I kept the first for another day!tYet knowing how way leads on to way,tI doubted if I should ever come back.t I shall be telling this with a sightSomewhere ages and ages hence:tTwo roads diverged in a wood, and I—tI took the one less traveled by,tAnd that has made all the difference.

He moves in darkness as it seems to meNot of woods only and the shade of trees.

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloudAnd goes down burning into the gulf below,No voice in nature is heard to cry aloudAt what has happened. Birds, at least must knowIt is the change to darkness in the sky.Murmuring something quiet in her breast,One bird begins to close a faded eye;Or overtaken too far from his nest,Hurrying low above the grove, some waifSwoops just in time to his remembered tree.At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!Now let the night be dark for all of me.Let the night be too dark for me to seeInto the future. Let what will be, be.

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

I hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo know that for destruction iceIs also great

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his sons the hardships that made him rich.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

If one by one we counted people outFor the least sin, it wouldn't take us longTo get so we had no one left to live with.For to be social is to be forgiving.

I have been one acquainted with the night.I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.I have outwalked the furthest city light.I have looked down the saddest city lane.I have passed by the watchman on his beatAnd dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

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

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

I always entertain great hopes.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

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.

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

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

Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work 12 hours a day.

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

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature.

Fire and IceSome say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I’ve tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.

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

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.

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

I have wished a bird would fly away,And not sing by my house all day;Have clapped my hands at him from the doorWhen it seemed as if I could bear no more.The fault must partly have been in me.The bird was not to blame for his keys.And of course there must be something wrongIn waiting to silence any song.

And lonely as it is that lonelinessWill be more lonely ere it will be less--A blanker whiteness of benighted snowWith no expression, nothing to express.They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars--on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.

INTO MY OWNOne of my wishes is that those dark trees,tSo old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,tWere not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,tBut stretched away unto the edge of doom.tI should not be withheld but that some dayt Into their vastness I should steal away,tFearless of ever finding open land,tOr highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.tI do not see why I should e’er turn back,tOr those should not set forth upon my trackt To overtake me, who should miss me heretAnd long to know if still I held them dear.tThey would not find me changed from him they knew—tOnly more sure of all I thought was true.

GATHERING LEAVESSpades take up leavesNo better than spoons,And bags full of leavesAre light as balloons.I make a great noiseOf rustling all dayLike rabbit and deerRunning away.But the mountains I raiseElude my embrace,Flowing over my armsAnd into my face.I may load and unloadAgain and againTill I fill the whole shed,And what have I then?Next to nothing for weight,And since they grew dullerFrom contact with earth,Next to nothing for color.Next to nothing for use.But a crop is a crop,And who's to say whereThe harvest shall stop?

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.

A Liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

We ran as if to meet the moon.

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

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

And on the worn book of old-golden I brought not here to read, it seems, but holdAnd freshen in this air of withering sweetness;

The best way out is always through.

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

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.

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 meThat I need learn to let go with the heart.

The farm is a base of operations–a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks–when he “comes to market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

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

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

Lovers, forget your love,And list the love of these,She a window flower,And he a winter breeze.

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?

The TelephoneWhen I was just as far as I could walkFrom here todayThere was an hourAll stillWhen leaning with my head against a flowerI heard you talk.Don't say I didn't for I heard you sayYou spoke from that flower on the window sill-Do you remember what it was you said ''First tell me what it was you thought you heard.''Having found the flower and driven a bee awayI leaned my headAnd holding by the stalkI listened and I thought I caught the wordWhat was itDid you call me by my name Or did you saySomeone said "Come"I heard it as I bowed.''I may have thought as much but not aloud.'Well so I came.

But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sight.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feetWhen far away an interrupted cryCame over houses from another street,But not to call me back or say good-bye;And further still at an unearthly height,A luminary clock against the skyProclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.I have been one acquainted with the night.

Two such as you with such a master speedCannot be parted nor be swept awayFrom one another once you are agreedThat life is only life forevermoreTogether wing to wing and oar to oar

There may be little or much beyond the grave But the strong are saying nothing until they see.