American
Poet
(March 26,
1874 -
January 29,
1963)
"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."
"The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise."
"The best way out is always through."
"A Servant to Servants" in North of Boston
"But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been - alone, As all must be, I said within my heart, Whether they work together or apart."
"The Tuft of Flowers" in A Boy's Will
"Butterflies ... flowers that fly and all but sing."
"By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day."
"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity."
"Courage is the human virtue that counts most - courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have."
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence. "
"For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing ... is discovering."
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. "
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."
"The Death of the Hired Man" in North of Boston
"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."
"An idea is a feat of association."
"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. "
"The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart."
"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. ... It finds the thought and the thought finds the words."
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
"The Road Not Taken" in Mountain Interval
"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."
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
"The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism."
