100+ Robert Frost Quotes: A Treasury of Wisdom on Love, Poetry and Nature

Robert Frost’s quotes are known for their deep insight into the human condition and the natural world. The poet’s use of simple language and imagery has made his work enduring and accessible to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Some of his most famous quotes are showcased below.

82 Most Famous Quotes by Robert Frost to Live By

Check out these most famous quotes by Robert Frost on love, life, poetry, and inspiration:

• The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
• I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
• Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
• By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
• 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.
• A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
• A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
• 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.
• I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.
• A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.
• Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
• A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
• If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.
• Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
• Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
• The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.
• 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.
• Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
• A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.
• 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.
• You can’t get too much winter in the winter.
• A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
• A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
• 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.
• I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.
• Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.
• There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.
• I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
• The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
• It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
• You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.
• Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.
• Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.
• No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
• The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
• No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.
• Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
• I’d just as soon play tennis with the net down.
• The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.
• If you don’t know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.
• Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

• The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
• The artist in me cries out for design.
• Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.
• One aged man – one man – can’t fill a house.
• Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
• To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
• A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body— the wishbone.
• Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.
• But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
• Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
• Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.
• Families break up when they get hints you don’t intend and miss hints that you do.
• Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
• Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
• Good fences make good neighbors.
• How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?
• I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
• I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn
• I am not a teacher, but an awakener.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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…
• Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.
• Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.
• Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.
• Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent.
• Our very life depends on everythings’ recurring til we answer from within.
• Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.
• The middle of the road is where the white line is—and that’s the worst place to drive.
• 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.
• The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
• The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.
• 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.
• 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.
• They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.
• Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.
• We ran as if to meet the moon.
• When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I’d waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I’d waste my life and be a poet. They were right.
• You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.
• 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.
• You’ve got to love what’s lovable, and hate what’s hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

5 Robert Frost Quotes on Life

Here are some insightful Robert Frost quotes on life:

• Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
• 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.
• In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
• Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
• Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

8 Motivational Robert Frost Quotes

Check out these profound motivational quotes by Robert Frost:

• The best way out is always through.
• Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
• Freedom lies in being bold.
• What we live by we die by.
• You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
• Hope is not found in a way out but a way through.
• Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.
• The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

6 Robert Frost Quotes on Love

Here are some beautiful Robert Frost quotes on love:

• Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
• 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 had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
• We love the things we love for what they are.
• What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.
• A poet never takes notes..you never take notes in a Love Affair.

3 Death Robert Frost Quotes

Check out these out-of-the-box Robert Frost quotes on death:

• 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.
• The only certain freedom’s in departure.
• Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

8 Robert Frost Quotes on Education

Here are some of the most significant Robert Frost quotes on education:

• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
• Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on.
• Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.
• College is a refuge from hasty judgment.
• 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.
• I go to school the youth to learn the future.
• The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
• I believe in teaching, but I don’t believe in going to school.

2 Robert Frost Quotes on Nature

Here are a couple of Robert Frost quotes on nature:

• 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 hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength. To feel the earth as rough to all my length.

7 Inspirational Quotes by Robert Frost

Check out these inspirational Robert Frost quotes to make your day:

• I always entertain great hopes.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Anything more than the truth would be too much.
• Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
• If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.

8 Robert Frost Quotes in Hindi

Here are some memorable Robert Frost quotes in Hindi:

• ​​मैंने अपनी पूरी जिंदगी में जो कुछ भी सीखा है उसे मात्र 3 शब्दों में समेट सकता हूं: जीवन चलता रहता है।
• किसी काम के होने की पीछे की वजह अगर हमें अच्छी लगती है, तो वो काम हमें अच्छी लगती है।
• यदि हम मुस्कुरा नहीं सकते तो हम सभी पागल हो सकते हैं।
• आजादी, साहसी निर्णयो को लेने से आती है।
• किसी भी चीज या काम से बाहर निकलने का सबसे बढ़िया तरीका उसके  अंदर से होकर बाहर निकलो।
• कविताएं वो हैं जिसके अनुवाद में इंसान पूरी तरह खो जाता है।
• मैं कोई उपदेशक नहीं परंतु जागरूकता फैलाने वाला जरूर हूं।
• कवि होना, एक जीवनशैली है, ना कि कोई पेशा।

FAQ