Top 350 Robert Frost Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I’ve given offense by saying I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

— Robert Frost

302. “At bottom the world isn’t a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he’s there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.”

— Robert Frost

303. “Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.”

— Robert Frost

304. “Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt – above paying its respects to anybody’s doubt whatsoever.”

— Robert Frost

305. “The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.”

— Robert Frost

306. “Men work together,” I told him from the heart, “Whether they work together or apart.”

— Robert Frost

307. “Man that is of woman born is apt to be as vain has his mother.”

— Robert Frost

308. “The heart’s gone out of it, why keep it up.”

— Robert Frost

309. “A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

— Robert Frost

310. “The realist always falls in love with a girl he has grown up with, the romanticist with a girl from ’off somewhere.”

— Robert Frost

311. “All thought is a feat of association.”

— Robert Frost

312. “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.”

— Robert Frost

313. “Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.”

— Robert Frost

314. “Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.”

— Robert Frost

315. “Poets like Shakespeare know more about poetry than any $25 an hour man.”

— Robert Frost

316. “The difference between a man and his valet: they both smoke the same cigars, but only one pays for them.”

— Robert Frost

317. “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.”

— Robert Frost

318. “Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, “grace” metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections – whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”

— Robert Frost

319. “It’s God – I recognised him from Blake’s picture.”

— Robert Frost

320. “Though we choose greatly, still to lack The lasting memory at all clear, That life has for us on the wrack Nothing but what we somehow chose; Thus are we wholly stripped of pride In the pain that has but one close, Bearing it crushed and mystified.”

— Robert Frost

321. “He studied Latin like the violin, because he liked it.”

— Robert Frost

322. “I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi.”

— Robert Frost

323. “But not gold in commercial quantities, Just enough gold to make the engagement rings And marriage rings of those who owned the farm. What gold more innocent could one have asked for?”

— Robert Frost

324. “I’m drunk-nonsensical tired out.”

— Robert Frost

325. “It’s hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it, and what’s in between doesn’t make much sense.”

— Robert Frost

326. “If one by one we counted people out.”

— Robert Frost

327. “He is all pine and I am apple orchard.”

— Robert Frost

328. “We shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short.”

— Robert Frost

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

— Robert Frost

330. “Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.”

— Robert Frost

331. “One age is like another for the soul.”

— Robert Frost

332. “Life is tons of discipline.”

— Robert Frost

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

— Robert Frost

334. “If the day ever comes when they know who They are, they may know better where they are.”

— Robert Frost

335. “Spare me the setting of my fate to music.”

— Robert Frost

336. “I am for the artist, who is more alone than he looks. I am not for the reformer, who is always active but usually has nothing to give. The real thing that you do is a lonely thing. And remember the paradox that you become more social in order that you may become more of an individual.”

— Robert Frost

337. “Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?”

— Robert Frost

338. “What are we? Young or new? We must be something.”

— Robert Frost

339. “Oh, give us pleasure in the orch-ard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night.”

— Robert Frost

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

— Robert Frost

341. “It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching.”

— Robert Frost

342. “An idea comes as close to something for nothing as you can get.”

— Robert Frost

343. “Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away.”

— Robert Frost

344. “The farm is a base of operations–a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks–when he “comes to market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.”

— Robert Frost

345. “Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?”

— Robert Frost

346. “In heaven we are all ghostwriters, if we write at all.”

— Robert Frost

347. “Monotony? Have we not always had the same stars and the same sky above us, changing only in its shades of blue and gray and purple black? And who shall say that such themes are exhausted? Have we not always had love and passion, war and peace, summer and winter and spring and fall with us? And are these things unable longer to impel us to spiritual variations?”

— Robert Frost

348. “The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I’d name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi... Leonard Bacon... but it is still too early to assertions. They’re all ‘in the field.’ It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.”

— Robert Frost

349. “I sha’n’t catch up in this world, anyway. I’d rather you’d not go unless you must.”

— Robert Frost

350. “I hate the idea that you ought to read the whole of anybody.”

— Robert Frost