Robert Lee Frost was a brilliant American poet. He is known for his realistic depictions of rural life using American colloquial speech. Frost often wrote about the settings in New England during the early 20th century, using them to explore complex philosophical and social themes.
Due Frost was frequently honored during his lifetime, earning four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and became one of America’s rare and outstanding public literary figures, nearly an artistic institution.
In 1960, Frost was granted the Congressional Gold Medal (highest civilian honor given by the U.S. Congress) for his poetic works. A year later, he was named “poet laureate” (a poet officially appointed by an institution or government to compose poems for special occasions and events) of Vermont.
Here are some of the most notable Robert Frost quotes and sayings that explores his thoughts and views regarding life, poetry, love, education, and so much more.
Table of Contents
Robert Frost Quotes About Poetry
1. “A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.”
2. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”
3. “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
4. “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.”
5. “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
6. “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”
7. “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
8. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, lovesickness.”
9. “I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.”
10. “Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.”
11. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
12. “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
13. “Poetry is about grief. Politics is about the grievance.”
Robert Frost Quotes About Life
1. “The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.”
2. “Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.”
3. “The best way out is always through.”
4. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
5. “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.”
6. “What we live by we die by.”
7. “Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.”
8. “If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.”
Robert Frost Quotes About Love
1. “You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.”
2. “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.”
3. “A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.”
4. “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”
5. “We love things we love what they are.”
6. “There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.”
Robert Frost Quotes About Education
1. “Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.”
2. “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
3. “Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on.
Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.”
4. “There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fills 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.”
Robert Frost, More Quotes & Sayings
1. “I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”
2. “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.”
3. “Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.”
4. “One aged man – one man – can’t fill a house.”
5. “Freedom lies in being bold.”
6. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
7. “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.”
8. “Humor is the most engaging cowardice.”
9. “You can’t get too much winter in the winter.”
10. “If you don’t know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.”
11. “You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.”
12. “The jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”
13. “The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.”
14. “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.”
15. “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”
16. “I had a lovers quarrel with the world.”
17. “The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”
18. “The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”
19. “Hell is a half-filled auditorium.”
20. “It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.”
21. “A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.”
22. “I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.”
23. “The only certain freedom’s in departure.”
24. “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.”
25. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”
26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and me – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
27. “I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.”
28. “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”
29. “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.”
30. “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.”
31. “We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.”
32. “If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.”
33. “A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.”
34. “The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”
35. “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.”
36. “A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”
37. “Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.”
38. “Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.”
39. “To be social is to be forgiving.”
40. “The middle of the road is where the white line is – and that’s the worst place to drive.”
41. “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”
42. “They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.”
43. “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
44. “The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.”
45. “I always entertain great hopes.”
If you would like to learn more about the writings of the brilliant Robert Frost, we would suggest you read The Poetry of Robert Frost (The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged).
