Carl Sandburg quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Carl Sandburg on Wise Famous Quotes.

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.

Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.

Life is an onion - you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.

There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.

People lie because they don't remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can't help making a story better than it was the way it happened.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.

I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land.

Revolt and terror pay a price.
Order and law have a cost.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

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.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.

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.

Time is a great teacher,
Who can live without hope?

I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

Now is the time. It is never too late to start something.

Wishes left on your lips
The mark of their wings.
Regrets fly kites in your eyes.

Blowing,Blowing
The gray slabs
Will lose you
the winds will flick you away
In a whiff

Tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers.

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.

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen - maybe.

Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it runs by.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn't have picked a better companion.

There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.

The shovel is brother to the gun.

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Time is the coin of our live. We must take care how we spend it.

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

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.

Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

I am an idealist. I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

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'.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.

The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.

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.

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

The people know what the land knows.

We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.

We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

There is no song to your singing.

The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.

Death comes once, let it be easy.

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.

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.

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.

I am! I have come through! I belong!

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.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is all children.

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.

What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?

The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot.

The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas.
Soldiers tied rags on their feet.
Red footprints wrote on the snow ...

The people will live on.The learning and blundering people will live on.

You know being born is important to you. You know nothing else was ever so important to you.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

Tell no man anything, for no man listens
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

Night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.

The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.

In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

Time is the coin of life. Only you can determine how it will be spent.