Robert Lee Frost is celebrated as one of the most acclaimed 20th century American poets.
Known for his depictions of New England rural life and command over colloquial speech, Frost explored intricate social and philosophical themes through his work.
After his father’s death in 1885, Frost’s family moved to Massachusetts, where he was educated.
His poetry career took off in 1894 with his first published poem, “My Butterfly An Elegy”. Frost also taught at several institutions, including New Hampshire’s Pinkerton Academy and Amherst College.
He was a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal in 1960.
He died in 1963 and is still remembered as an influential figure in American literature.
See also: Lao Tzu Quotes and Zig Ziglar Quotes.
I have carefully selected some of the best quotes from Robert Frost for you.
Best Robert Frost Quotes
1. “The best way out is always through.” ~ (Robert Frost).
2. “Freedom lies in being bold.” ~ (Robert Frost).
3. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” ~ (Robert Frost).
4. “The 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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
5. “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ~ (Robert Frost).
6. “I have miles to go before I sleep…” ~ (Robert Frost).
7. “How many things would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” ~ (Robert Frost).
8. “Good fences make good neighbors.” ~ (Robert Frost).
9. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” ~ (Robert Frost).
10. “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.” ~ (Robert Frost).
11. “Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.” ~ (Robert Frost).
12. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
13. “I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.” ~ (Robert Frost).
Wise Robert Frost Quotes
14. “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 today. Nothing gold can stay.” ~ (Robert Frost).
15. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” ~ (Robert Frost).
16. “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” ~ (Robert Frost).
17. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
18. “The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.” ~ (Robert Frost).
19. “By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” ~ (Robert Frost).
20. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” ~ (Robert Frost).
21. “We love the things we love for what they are.” ~ (Robert Frost).
22. “Nothing gold can stay.” ~ (Robert Frost).
23. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
24. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” ~ (Robert Frost).
25. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
26. “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.” ~ (Robert Frost).
27. “Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” ~ (Robert Frost).
28. “A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.” ~ (Robert Frost).
29. “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” ~ (Robert Frost).
30. “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” ~ (Robert Frost).
31. “A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth.” ~ (Robert Frost).
32. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth.” ~ (Robert Frost).
Profound Robert Frost Quotes
33. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
34. “We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.” ~ (Robert Frost).
35. “When work becomes play, and play becomes your work, your life unfolds.” ~ (Robert Frost).
36. “Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30.” ~ (Robert Frost).
37. “The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.” ~ (Robert Frost).
38. “A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.” ~ (Robert Frost).
39. “Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.” ~ (Robert Frost).
40. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” ~ (Robert Frost).
41. “Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.” ~ (Robert Frost).
42. “Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.” ~ (Robert Frost).
43. “I dwell in a lonely house I know that vanished many a summer ago.” ~ (Robert Frost).
44. “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” ~ (Robert Frost).
45. “The heart can think of no devotion Greater than being shore to the ocean- Holding the curve of one position, Counting an endless repetition.” ~ (Robert Frost).
46. “Writing a poem is discovering.” ~ (Robert Frost).
47. “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” ~ (Robert Frost).
48. “The beauty of enmity is insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security.” ~ (Robert Frost).
49. “It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.” ~ (Robert Frost).
50. “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” ~ (Robert Frost).
51. “I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.” ~ (Robert Frost).
52. “A definite purpose, like blinders on a horse, inevitably narrows its possessor’s point of view.” ~ (Robert Frost).
Deep Robert Frost Quotes
53. “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” ~ (Robert Frost).
54. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
55. “Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That’s voting.” ~ (Robert Frost).
56. “I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.” ~ (Robert Frost).
57. “Courage is the human virtue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That’s all any of us have.” ~ (Robert Frost).
58. “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” ~ (Robert Frost).
59. “Don’t join too many gangs. Join a few if any. Join the United States and join the family- But not much in between unless a college.” ~ (Robert Frost).
60. “I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.” ~ (Robert Frost).
61. “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.” ~ (Robert Frost).
62. “You’ve got to love what’s lovable, and hate what’s hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.” ~ (Robert Frost).
63. “There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.” ~ (Robert Frost).
64. “Any work of art must first of all tell a story.” ~ (Robert Frost).
65. “An idea is a feat of association.” ~ (Robert Frost).
66. “I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew.” ~ (Robert Frost).
67. “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.” ~ (Robert Frost).
68. “The rose is a rose, And was always a rose. But now the theory 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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
69. “College is a refuge from hasty judgment.” ~ (Robert Frost).
70. “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” ~ (Robert Frost).
Top Robert Frost Quotes
71. “There is absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go slow.” ~ (Robert Frost).
72. “A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.” ~ (Robert Frost).
73. “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling.” ~ (Robert Frost).
74. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
75. “I’m always saying something that’s just the edge of something more.” ~ (Robert Frost).
76. “How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?” ~ (Robert Frost).
77. “Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other’s business.” ~ (Robert Frost).
78. “We ran as if to meet the moon.” ~ (Robert Frost).
79. “Earth’s the right place for love. I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” ~ (Robert Frost).
80. “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?” ~ (Robert Frost).
81. “The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.” ~ (Robert Frost).
82. “The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength. To feel the earth as rough to all my length.” ~ (Robert Frost).
83. “Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.” ~ (Robert Frost).
84. “A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look.” ~ (Robert Frost).
85. “Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.” ~ (Robert Frost).
86. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
87. “Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation.” ~ (Robert Frost).
88. “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 beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.” ~ (Robert Frost).
89. “Have courage and a little willingness to venture and be defeated.” ~ (Robert Frost).
90. “The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.” ~ (Robert Frost).
91. “He burned his house down for the fire insurance and spent the proceeds on a telescope.” ~ (Robert Frost).
92. “Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right.” ~ (Robert Frost).
93. “Democracy is the best chance for the best people.” ~ (Robert Frost).
94. “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.” ~ (Robert Frost).
95. “I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.” ~ (Robert Frost).
96. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
97. “You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.” ~ (Robert Frost).
98. “The people I want to hear about are the people who take risks.” ~ (Robert Frost).
99. “My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight.” ~ (Robert Frost).
100. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
101. “Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that’s what a poet is doing: loosening the words.” ~ (Robert Frost).
102. “There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.” ~ (Robert Frost).
103. “Only God and I knew what I meant when I wrote it, now only God knows.” ~ (Robert Frost).
Short Robert Frost Quotes
104. “Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.” ~ (Robert Frost).
105. “I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.” ~ (Robert Frost).
106. “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” ~ (Robert Frost).
107. “Live life like its the last breath you take for that breath is the whole essence of living, the little things in life are what connects us to all the big things we live for.” ~ (Robert Frost).
108. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
109. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
110. “You’ve got to be brave and you’ve got to be bold. Brave enough to take your chance on your own discrimination, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad.” ~ (Robert Frost).
111. “And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.” ~ (Robert Frost).
112. “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in position to look too close.” ~ (Robert Frost).
113. “Create and stir other people to create.” ~ (Robert Frost).
114. “What we live by we die by.” ~ (Robert Frost).
115. “All the fun is in how you say a thing.” ~ (Robert Frost).
116. “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” ~ (Robert Frost).
117. “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.” ~ (Robert Frost).
118. “The middle of the road is where the white line is – and that’s the worst place to drive.” ~ (Robert Frost).
119. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
120. “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars – on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.” ~ (Robert Frost).
121. “I turned to speak to God About the world’s despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn’t there.” ~ (Robert Frost).
122. “You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.” ~ (Robert Frost).
123. “Let me be the one To do what is done.” ~ (Robert Frost).
124. “I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.” ~ (Robert Frost).
125. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
126. “Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.” ~ (Robert Frost).
127. “I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.” ~ (Robert Frost).
128. “The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.” ~ (Robert Frost).
129. “So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.” ~ (Robert Frost).
130. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and wants it down.” ~ (Robert Frost).
131. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
132. “The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed and while I am making up my bed I am making up my mind as to what kind of a day I am going to have.” ~ (Robert Frost).
133. “Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.” ~ (Robert Frost).
134. “All those who try to go it sole alone, Too proud to be beholden for relief, Are absolutely sure to come to grief.” ~ (Robert Frost).
135. “A champion of the workingman has never been known to die of overwork.” ~ (Robert Frost).
136. “To be social is to be forgiving.” ~ (Robert Frost).
137. “The test is always how we treat the poor.” ~ (Robert Frost).
138. “I only hope that when I am free, as they are free to go in quest, of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life, it may not seem better to me to rest.” ~ (Robert Frost).
139. “The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.” ~ (Robert Frost).
140. “Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial, but not everything commercial is honest.” ~ (Robert Frost).
141. “More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work.” ~ (Robert Frost).
Inspiring Robert Frost Quotes
142. “The only certain freedom’s in departure.” ~ (Robert Frost).
143. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” ~ (Robert Frost).
144. “Anything more than the truth would be too much.” ~ (Robert Frost).
145. “Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don’t know why people shouldn’t write poetry. That’s brave.” ~ (Robert Frost).
146. “I never take my own side in a quarrel.” ~ (Robert Frost).
147. “Nature’s first green is gold.” ~ (Robert Frost).
148. “One of the hardest things in life to accept is a called third strike.” ~ (Robert Frost).
149. “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day.” ~ (Robert Frost).
150. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
151. “Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” ~ (Robert Frost).
152. “All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.” ~ (Robert Frost).
153. “The old dog barks backward without getting up I can remember when he was a pup.” ~ (Robert Frost).
154. “What makes a nation in the beginning is a good piece of geography.” ~ (Robert Frost).
155. “You can’t get too much winter in the winter.” ~ (Robert Frost).
156. “The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” ~ (Robert Frost).
157. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
158. “That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.” ~ (Robert Frost).
159. “The sidelong glance is what you depend on.” ~ (Robert Frost).
160. “But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round, And only by one’s going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.” ~ (Robert Frost).
161. “All great things are done for their own sake.” ~ (Robert Frost).
162. “What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.” ~ (Robert Frost).
163. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
164. “The chance is the remotest, Of its going much longer unnoticed, That I’m not keeping pace With the headlong human race.” ~ (Robert Frost).
165. “A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.” ~ (Robert Frost).
166. “If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.” ~ (Robert Frost).
167. “What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite.” ~ (Robert Frost).
168. “The best thing we’re put here for’s to see; The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s a telescope. Someone in every town, seems to me, owes it to the town to keep one.” ~ (Robert Frost).
169. “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” ~ (Robert Frost).
170. “Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.” ~ (Robert Frost).
171. “A good book has no ending.” ~ (Robert Frost).
172. “Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.” ~ (Robert Frost).
173. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
174. “Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.” ~ (Robert Frost).
175. “I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.” ~ (Robert Frost).
176. “Freedom is when you are easy in the harness.” ~ (Robert Frost).
177. “There is the fear that we shan’t prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man -fear that men won’t understand us and we shall be cut of from them.” ~ (Robert Frost).
178. “I always entertain great hopes.” ~ (Robert Frost).
179. “Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.” ~ (Robert Frost).
180. “If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.” ~ (Robert Frost).
181. “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).
182. “A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.” ~ (Robert Frost).
183. “Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.” ~ (Robert Frost).
184. “People are inexterminable like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices that’s us.” ~ (Robert Frost).
185. “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.” ~ (Robert Frost).
186. “Poetry is a reaching out forward expression, an effort to find fulfillment.” ~ (Robert Frost).
187. “Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It’s like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.” ~ (Robert Frost).
188. “Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?” ~ (Robert Frost).
189. “Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.” ~ (Robert Frost).
190. “Don’t be an agnostic. Be something.” ~ (Robert Frost).
191. “I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn’t been.” ~ (Robert Frost).
192. “A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.” ~ (Robert Frost).
193. “A poem begins with a lump in the throat.” ~ (Robert Frost).
194. “I never feel more at home than at a ballgame.” ~ (Robert Frost).
195. “I play better tennis because the court is there.” ~ (Robert Frost).
196. “Start with a big fat lump in your throat. Start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, a crazy lovesickness, and run with it. If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love. And don’t stop until you get what you love.” ~ (Robert Frost).
197. “We go to school to learn what books to read for the rest of our lives.” ~ (Robert Frost).
198. “There is little much beyond the grave, but the strong are saying nothing until they see.” ~ (Robert Frost).
199. “Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.” ~ (Robert Frost).
200. “Ants are a curious race.” ~ (Robert Frost).
201. “If you’re looking for something to be brave about, consider fine arts.” ~ (Robert Frost).
