Quotes from Robert Frost

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

I dwell in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You're one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, a cloud come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.

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

For, dear me, why abandon a belief, Merely because it ceases to be true, Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt, It will turn true again, for so it goes.

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.

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.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart

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

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.

Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Lodged 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.

Fire and Ice 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.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, A luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.

Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes Is the deed ever truly done For Heaven and the future's sakes

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

I am one who has been acquainted with the night

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.

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.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

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.

To be social is to be forgiving.