Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Frost

Frost slips a grin into a prayer. By echoing the cadence of the Lord's Prayer ("forgive us... as we forgive..."), he borrows moral authority only to undercut it, replacing sin with "nonsense" and righteousness with the far more common human pastime: mistaking our own noise for sense. It reads like humility, but it performs something sharper. Frost isn’t merely asking pardon for saying foolish things; he’s insisting that everyone else is doing it too, and that the real offense is the certainty with which we do it.

The line works because it turns forgiveness into a social contract for fallibility. "My nonsense" admits the poet's own evasions, exaggerations, maybe even the indulgence of metaphor itself. "Those that think they talk sense" targets a different species of nonsense: the pompous, the literal-minded, the people who confuse confidence for clarity. Frost, often treated as the plainspoken New England sage, is reminding you that plain speech can be its own con.

Context matters: Frost wrote in an era obsessed with "modern" seriousness and intellectual authority, when poets were expected either to be high priests of meaning or clever technicians of form. He refuses both roles. The subtext is an ethics of conversation: if we grant ourselves room to be wrong, we have to extend the same mercy to the self-appointed sensible. It’s not relativism; it’s a warning about certainty dressed as a blessing.