Top 484 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Frost - Page 3

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father s. He's more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

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.

Courage is the human virtue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have.

Good fences make good neighbors.

Life is tons of discipline.

The rose is a rose, And was always a rose. But the theory now goes That the apple's a rose, And the pear is, and so's The plum, I suppose. The dear only knows What will next prove a rose. You, of course, are a rose - But were always a rose.

How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

The beauty of enmity is insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security.

What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite.

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

We love the things we love for what they are.

A definite purpose, like blinders on a horse, inevitably narrows its possessor's point of view.

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

There is absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go slow.

Don't be agnostic - be something.

One of the hardest things in life to accept is a called third strike.

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

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.

There are tones of voices that mean more than words.

The truly educated can listen to any view without losing their temper or self-confidence.

Far more violence has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.

All thought is a feat of association; having what's in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn't know you knew

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.

If there is one thing in life that I have learned about life it is... it goes on.

Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30.

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

I am not a teacher. I am an awakener.

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

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

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.

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 only way out is through.

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.

Freedom is when you are easy in the harness.

I'm not a teacher, but an awakener.

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

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

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

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.

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

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.

Writing a poem is discovering.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Don't be an agnostic. Be something.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

Butterflies...flowers that fly and all but sing.