Carl Sandburg Quotes (212 Quotes)

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know

Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, lonely wagons, and the crack-crack of rifles sputtering flashes into an ambush.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

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

I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

One steel star whisks out a pointed fire.

Men of ideas vanish first when freedom vanishes.

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.

The night is a lover of mine .

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

Why shall I keep the old name?

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

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

Love stands against fire and flood and much bitterness, would only initiate a second misunderstanding, and bickerings with lapses of silence.

Spools of fire wind and wind.

The winter is young yet, so young.

Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence.

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.

Time is a young man with ballplayer legs, time runs a winning race against life and the clocks, time tickles with rust and spots.

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

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

CHICAGO Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.

Let it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out till all the answers are made, the last dollar spent and the last blood gone.

There are people who want to be everywhere at once and they seem to get nowhere

It is a joke in ghosts.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.

My love is a graybird living in the eaves of a Michigan house all winter.

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.

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

Is the red heart of man only ashes?

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.

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

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

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.

They beat in the cool of the night time.

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 phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

I LOVE him, I love him, ran the patter of her lips
And she formed his name on her tongue and sang
And she sent him word she loved him so much,
So much, and death was nothing; work, art, home,
All was nothing if her love for him was not first
Of all; the patter of her lips ran, I love him,
I love him; and he knew the doors that opened
Into doors and more doors, no end of doors,
And full length mirrors doubling and tripling
The apparitions of doors: circling corridors of
Looking glasses and doors, some with knobs, some
With no knobs, some opening slow to a heavy push,
And some jumping open at a touch and a hello.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

In the average newspaper there is not a complete suppression of stories that the sacred cows don't want printed. But rather what happens is that the stories get printed with stresses, colorations and emphasis that favor the sacred cows.

There is no song to your singing.

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.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

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

One more day of bread and work.