Carl Sandburg Quotes (212 Quotes)

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 shovel changes, the floor changes.

Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.

O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.

We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.

The Lawyers, Bob, know too much.

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

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo planes don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devises and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable.

An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.

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.

The aprons of silence covered me.

I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.

No Hamlet hold my jaws and speak
How jokes are gone and empty is my mouth.

Nothing happens unless first a dream.

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

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

I offer you memories and people.

My love is an early robin flaming an ember of copper on her shoulders in March and April.

Time says hush by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all.

The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that
can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.

When Abraham Lincoln was shovelled into the tombs,he forgot the copperheads and the assassin . . .in the dust, in the cool tombs.

I speak of new cities and new people.

It was a shot in one second of hate out of ten years of love.

The four brothers shall be five and more.

The fog comeson little cat feet. It sits looking overharbor and cityon silent haunchesand then moves on.

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at TV. They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. They knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.

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

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.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

I cannot remember the name of it.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Speak softly-the sacred cows may hear.

Why is there always a secret singing when a lawyer cashes in Why does a hearse horse snicker hauling a lawyer away.

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 have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.

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

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

It came over them every man is crucified
only once in his life and the law of humanity dictates
silver nails be used for the job.

They too are the dream of a sculptor.

Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

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

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as a rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

Sandburg's retelling of Lincoln's attendance at an evangelist rally led by Peter Cartwright in 1846, in response to accusations by Cartwright's followers that he was an infidel - Cartwright was his opponent in his race for Congress.

Your eyes and the valley are memories.