Popular Robert Frost's Quotes And Sayings

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

O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow, Make the day seem to us less brief... Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst.

Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me.

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

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

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

Many lovers have been divorced By having what is free enforced.

Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That's voting.

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.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away.

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 am not a teacher. I am an awakener.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

The old dog barks backward without getting up I can remember when he was a pup.

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 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.

The only way out is through.

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.

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

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

Writing a poem is discovering.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.

You know how cunningly mankind is planned: We have one loving and one hating hand. The loving's made to hold each other like, While with the hating other hand we strike.

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

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

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 strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

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

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

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

And of course there must be something wrong In wanting to silence any song.

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.

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

Earth would soon Be uninhabitable as the moon. What for that matter had it ever been? Who advised man to come and live therein?

To be social is to be forgiving.

Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.

If you're looking for something to be brave about, consider fine arts.

Don't be an agnostic. Be something.

The artist in me cries out for design.

Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.

Meditate nothing. Learn to contemplate. Contemplate glory. There will be a light. Contemplate Truth until it burns your eyes out.

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.

Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.

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

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.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Diplomacy, n : 1. The patriotic art of lying for one's country. 2. The art of letting someone have your way. 3. The art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a rock. A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

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.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

What we live by we die by.

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.

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

More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work.

You can't get too much winter in the winter.

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.

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

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.

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

You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.

Any work of art must first of all tell a story.

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

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood Throws down in front of us is not to bar Our passage to our journey's end for good, But just to ask us who we think we are.

I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.

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.

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year. Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only middles.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

The only way round is through.

One of the lies would make it out that nothing Ever presents itself before us twice. Where would we be at last if that were so? Our very life depends on everything's Recurring till we answer from within.

I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

It's God - I recognised him from Blake's picture.

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

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

The only way around is through.

When I see birches bend to left and right... I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

Nature is always hinting at us.

I play better tennis because the court is there.

Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand.

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.

In spring more mortal singers than belong To any one place cover us with song. Thrush, bluebird, blackbird, sparrow, and robin throng.

Out alone in the winter rain, / Intent on giving and taking pain.

Freedom is slavery some poets tell us. Enslave yourself to the right leader's truth, Christ's or Karl Marx', and it will set you free.

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.

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, The road is forlorn all day, Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, And the hoof-prints vanish away. The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee, Expend their bloom in vain. Come over the hills and far with me, And be my love in the rain.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

There is much in nature against us. But we forget: Take nature altogether since time began, Including human nature, in peace and war, And it must be a little more in favor of man.

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.

In A Glass of Cider It seemed I was a mite of sediment That waited for the bottom to ferment So I could catch a bubble in ascent. I rode up on one till the bubble burst, And when that left me to sink back reversed I was no worse off than I was at first. I'd catch another bubble if I waited. The thing was to get now and then elated.

Nothing gold can stay.

Our lives laid down in war and peace may not Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight. And that they may be is the only prayer Worth praying. May my sacrifice Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight.

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

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