Top 100 Carl Sandburg Quotes
#2. I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
Carl Sandburg
#3. Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
Carl Sandburg
#4. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
#5. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
Carl Sandburg
#6. I am an idealist. I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.
Carl Sandburg
#8. I've written some poetry I don't understand myself
Carl Sandburg
#9. A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.
Carl Sandburg
#10. Revolt and terror pay a price.
Order and law have a cost.
Carl Sandburg
#11. Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
Carl Sandburg
#13. I am the people the mob the crowd the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
Carl Sandburg
#14. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.
Carl Sandburg
#15. Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.
Carl Sandburg
#16. My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.
Carl Sandburg
#18. The impact of television on our culture is ... indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.
Carl Sandburg
#19. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
#20. Tell no man anything, for no man listens
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.
Carl Sandburg
#21. The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Carl Sandburg
#22. Time is the coin of your Life.
It is the only coin you have,
and only you can determine
how it will be spent.
Be careful
lest you let other people spend it for you. And when you spend it, spend it wisely so that you get the most for
your expenditure.
Carl Sandburg
#24. There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.
Carl Sandburg
#25. Blowing,Blowing
The gray slabs
Will lose you
the winds will flick you away
In a whiff
Carl Sandburg
#26. Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.
Carl Sandburg
#28. The secret to happiness is to admire without desiring.
Carl Sandburg
#29. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.
Carl Sandburg
#30. POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
Carl Sandburg
#31. Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
Carl Sandburg
#32. Why did he write to her, "I can't live without you?" And why did she write to him "I can't live without you?" For he went west and she went east and they both lived.
Carl Sandburg
#34. Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.
Carl Sandburg
#35. I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.
Carl Sandburg
#36. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
Carl Sandburg
#37. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.
Carl Sandburg
#38. One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Carl Sandburg
#39. The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
Carl Sandburg
#40. Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg
#41. Now is the time. It is never too late to start something.
Carl Sandburg
#42. Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back. They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can't hear you calling. Look out how you use proud words.
Carl Sandburg
#43. Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.
Carl Sandburg
#44. My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.
Carl Sandburg
#45. A tree is best measured when it is down - and so it is with people.
Carl Sandburg
#46. Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.
Carl Sandburg
#47. It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.
Carl Sandburg
#48. Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.
Carl Sandburg
#49. I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.
Carl Sandburg
#51. I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.
Carl Sandburg
#52. There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is all children.
Carl Sandburg
#53. Night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.
Carl Sandburg
#55. Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.
Carl Sandburg
#56. Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
Carl Sandburg
#57. Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.
Carl Sandburg
#58. Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning ... proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
Carl Sandburg
#59. I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it
Carl Sandburg
#60. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.
Carl Sandburg
#63. Let your heart look
on white sea spray
and be lonely.
Love is a fool star.
You and a ring of stars
may mention my name
and then forget me.
Love is a fool star.
Carl Sandburg
#64. When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg
#65. Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.
Carl Sandburg
#66. A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.
Carl Sandburg
#67. Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
Carl Sandburg
#68. To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.
Carl Sandburg
#69. The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.
Carl Sandburg
#70. There are some people so lonely, they think God is lonely too-
Carl Sandburg
#71. If I added to their pride of America, I am happy.
Carl Sandburg
#73. There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
Carl Sandburg
#74. To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.
Carl Sandburg
#75. Wishes left on your lips
The mark of their wings.
Regrets fly kites in your eyes.
Carl Sandburg
#76. The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.
Carl Sandburg
#77. We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.
Carl Sandburg
#78. I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
Carl Sandburg
#79. There is a wolf in me ... - I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
Carl Sandburg
#81. Tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers.
Carl Sandburg
#82. Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.
Carl Sandburg
#83. And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.
Carl Sandburg
#84. Tongues wrangled dark at a man.
He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone.
In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.
Carl Sandburg
#85. And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.
Carl Sandburg
#86. Life is an onion - you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.
Carl Sandburg
#87. The doorknobs open the doors. The windows are always either open or shut. We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house. Everything is the same as it always was.
Carl Sandburg
#88. My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
Carl Sandburg
#89. Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Carl Sandburg
#90. In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.
Carl Sandburg
#91. I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.
Carl Sandburg
#92. Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
#93. I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
Carl Sandburg
#94. There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always.
If the music dies down there is a silence.
Almost the same as the movement of music.
To know silence perfectly is to know music.
Carl Sandburg
#95. Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.
Carl Sandburg
#96. I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
Carl Sandburg
#97. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
Carl Sandburg
#98. Time is the coin of our live. We must take care how we spend it.
Carl Sandburg
#100. SONG OF THE MAN WHO WAS TO BE HUNG The thunders will take me home, whenever I mind to go home, my friends, and the wind it will take me home, too.
Carl Sandburg
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