Top 100 Sandburg's Quotes
#1. As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Gore Vidal
#2. Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.
Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.
See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Carl Sandburg
#3. Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
Carl Sandburg
#4. Come clean with a child heart
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind
Let rain on a house roof be a song
Let the writing on your face
be a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Carl Sandburg
#5. Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.
Carl Sandburg
#6. POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
Carl Sandburg
#7. I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.
Carl Sandburg
#8. The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.
Carl Sandburg
#9. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.
Carl Sandburg
#10. The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading Keep Off.
Carl Sandburg
#12. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.
Carl Sandburg
#13. The secret to happiness is to admire without desiring.
Carl Sandburg
#15. 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
#16. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
#17. I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.
Robert Frost
#18. I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.
Carl Sandburg
#19. All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.
Carl Sandburg
#20. Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.
Carl Sandburg
#21. Blowing,Blowing
The gray slabs
Will lose you
the winds will flick you away
In a whiff
Carl Sandburg
#22. 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
#23. And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.
Carl Sandburg
#24. I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn't have picked a better companion.
Carl Sandburg
#25. I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
Carl Sandburg
#26. Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence.
Carl Sandburg
#27. I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.
Carl Sandburg
#28. Such a Big miracle in such a tiny baby. Big things often have small beginnings A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
Carl Sandburg
#29. I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.
Sandra Cisneros
#30. 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
#31. When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the wrack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time.
Carl Sandburg
#32. The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.
Carl Sandburg
#33. We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
Carl Sandburg
#34. The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
Gore Vidal
#35. Somebody's little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.
Carl Sandburg
#36. There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is all children.
Carl Sandburg
#37. 8819Passers-by,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city's afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.
Carl Sandburg
#38. If [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.
Carl Sandburg
#39. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
Carl Sandburg
#40. To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.
Carl Sandburg
#41. A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
Carl Sandburg
#42. Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
Carl Sandburg
#43. The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.
Carl Sandburg
#44. There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud
Carl Sandburg
#46. All we need to begin with is a # dream that we can do better than before. All we need to have is faith, and that dream will come true. All we need to do is act, and the time for action is now.
Carl Sandburg
#47. I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
Carl Sandburg
#48. The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
Carl Sandburg
#49. 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
#51. 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
#52. A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.
Carl Sandburg
#53. Revolt and terror pay a price.
Order and law have a cost.
Carl Sandburg
#54. If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell
Carl Sandburg
#55. A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.
Carl Sandburg
#56. All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.
Carl Sandburg
#57. Let only the young come,
Says the sea.
Let them kiss my face
And hear me.
I am the last word
And I tell
Where storms and stars come from.
Carl Sandburg
#58. I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.
Carl Sandburg
#59. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
Carl Sandburg
#60. I've written some poetry I don't understand myself
Carl Sandburg
#61. There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere
Carl Sandburg
#62. In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning
Carl Sandburg
#63. A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.
Carl Sandburg
#64. Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
Carl Sandburg
#65. There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.
Carl Sandburg
#66. I am an idealist. I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.
Carl Sandburg
#67. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
Carl Sandburg
#68. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.
Carl Sandburg
#72. Be careful with your words, once they are said, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten.
Carl Sandburg
#73. You know being born is important to you. You know nothing else was ever so important to you.
Carl Sandburg
#74. The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.
Carl Sandburg
#75. I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg
#77. I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision
Carl Sandburg
#78. I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.
Carl Sandburg
#79. 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
#80. The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Carl Sandburg
#81. Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it runs by.
Carl Sandburg
#82. The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me ... by newspapers and the Bible.
Van Wyck Brooks
#83. Freedom is baffling: men having it often know not they have it till it is gone and they no longer have it.
Carl Sandburg
#84. Tell no man anything, for no man listens
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.
Carl Sandburg
#85. 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
#86. To those who had ordered them to death one of them said: 'We die because the people are asleep ... you will die because the people will awaken'.
Carl Sandburg
#87. 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
#88. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
Carl Sandburg
#91. My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.
Carl Sandburg
#92. Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.
Carl Sandburg
#93. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.
Carl Sandburg
#94. When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
Carl Sandburg
#95. Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
#96. 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
#97. I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.
Carl Sandburg
#99. 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
#100. Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.
Carl Sandburg
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