Robert Frost (1874–1963) was one of America’s most famous poets. This four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize is celebrated for such well-known poems as “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Frost’s early years were difficult. After quitting Harvard University due to illness at age 25, Frost lived on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for 12 years. He woke up early to write poetry and then worked on the farm all day. He was not a successful farmer, and his family grew destitute. Frost sold the farm and moved to Britain in 1911. There, he befriended the poet and essayist Edward Thomas; they regularly took long walks in the English countryside. Thomas’s habitual hesitancy on what path they should stroll amused Frost and inspired his best-known poem, “The Road Not Taken” from Mountain Interval (1920.)
In England, Frost published A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914.) The latter sold 20,000 copies and made him famous. After three years in Britain, Frost returned to America and supported himself through his readings and his writing. Frost’s other books include Mountain Interval (1916,) New Hampshire (1923,) A Further Range (1937,) and A Witness Tree (1943.)
Frost’s poetry is revered to this day for his portrayals of the country life of New England with ordinary people and everyday routines, and his grasp of American colloquial speech.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert Frost
It’s rest I want—there, I have said it out—
From cooking meals for hungry hired men
And washing dishes after them—from doing
Things over and over that just won’t stay done.
By good rights I ought not to have so much
Put on me, but there seems no other way.
Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or in so far
As that I can see no way out but through—
Leastways for me—and then they’ll be convinced.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Persistence
And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Failure
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Poetry
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
Topics: Achievements, Acceptance
College is a refuge from hasty judgment.
—Robert Frost
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Reading, Books, Literature
The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Will, Will Power, Willpower, World
Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Fighting, Fight
What is this talked-of mystery of birth but being mounted bareback on the earth?
—Robert Frost
Topics: Birth
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
Topics: Choice
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Reason
We get twitted now and then on how we made this country. Well, we took the whole business, of course. It’s not just that corner that we took away from Mexico. When we got it all together, we got a very shapely country-the best continental cut in all the world, between the two oceans and in the right temperature zone.
—Robert Frost
Topics: America
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Evil
Heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in position to look too close.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Heaven
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
—Robert Frost
Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That is voting.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
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 offense.
—Robert Frost
Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial, but not everything commercial is honest.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Honesty
Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Thinking
The world is filled with willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Action
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Poetry, Art
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Writers
The only way around is through.
—Robert Frost
Topics: General, Success & Failure, Achievement
How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?
—Robert Frost
Topics: Experience
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.
—Robert Frost
You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Parents, Government, Dreams, Parenting, Greatness, Father
Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough and… it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Thought, Truth, Reason
Entertain great hopes.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Hope
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Nature, Living Well, Meaning, Life, Purpose, Living
All thought is a feat of association; having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Thoughts
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
Topics: Communication, World
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Optimism
It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Worry
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Poetry, Art, Poets
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
Topics: Society, Marriage
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
Topics: Family
Poetry is what is lost in translation.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Art, Poetry
Nothing Gold Can Stay
—Robert Frost
Topics: Gold
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
—Robert Frost
Topics: Love, Desire, Romance, Feelings, Marriage
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
Topics: Promises, Goals
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