I always entertain great hopes.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both.

I am one who has been acquainted with the night.

Democracy is the best chance for the best people.

I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.

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.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that’s what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

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.

If you’re looking for something to be brave about, consider fine arts.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right.

Have courage and a little willingness to venture and be defeated.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

A good book has no ending.

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.

All great things are done for their own sake.

We ran as if to meet the moon.

A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look.

The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

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

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.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation.

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.

You can’t get too much winter in the winter.

To be social is to be forgiving.

The old dog barks backward without getting up I can remember when he was a pup.

Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

I’m always saying something that’s just the edge of something more.

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.

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 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.

Any work of art must first of all tell a story.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

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.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other’s business.

I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew.

You’ve got to love what’s lovable, and hate what’s hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any. Join the United States and join the family- But not much in between unless a college.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

There is absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go slow.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

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

Courage is the human virtue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That’s all any of us have.

Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That’s voting.

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.

I never take my own side in a quarrel.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

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.

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.

One of the hardest things in life to accept is a called third strike.

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don’t know why people shouldn’t write poetry. That’s brave.

Anything more than the truth would be too much.

A definite purpose, like blinders on a horse, inevitably narrows its possessor’s point of view.

More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work.

The test is always how we treat the poor.

Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial, but not everything commercial is honest.

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.

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

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day.

Nature’s first green is gold.

All those who try to go it sole alone, Too proud to be beholden for relief, Are absolutely sure to come to grief.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

A champion of the workingman has never been known to die of overwork.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.

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.

Let me be the one To do what is done.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and wants it down.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

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.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

Create and stir other people to create.

I turned to speak to God About the world’s despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn’t there.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

What we live by we die by.

Nothing gold can stay.

Let me be the one To do what is done.

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.

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

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.

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.

There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.

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.

The middle of the road is where the white line is – and that’s the worst place to drive.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

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.

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in position to look too close.

Writing a poem is discovering.

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.

Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.

I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

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.

If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.

The beauty of enmity is insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security.

Only God and I knew what I meant when I wrote it, now only God knows.

My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

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

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

We love the things we love for what they are.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

The heart can think of no devotion Greater than being shore to the ocean- Holding the curve of one position, Counting an endless repetition.

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.

Good fences make good neighbors.

Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

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.

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.

When work becomes play, and play becomes your work, your life unfolds.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

Freedom lies in being bold.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

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.

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.

I have miles to go before I sleep.

By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

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.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.

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.

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.

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.

The best way out is always through.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

How many things would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

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.