Carl Sandburg Quotes

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

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

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.

Be careful with your words, once they are said, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

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

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

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it until the test comes.

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

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.

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

Man is a long time coming. Man will yet win. Brother may yet line up with brother: This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.There are men who can't be bought.

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

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

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

There are dreams stronger than death. Men and women die holding these dreams.

Beware of advice-even this.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the women don't get you then the whiskey must.

Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

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.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.

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

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

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

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.

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.

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.

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

To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.

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

I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.

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

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

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

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

The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.

A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.

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

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

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

The past is a bucket of ashes

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.

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

I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

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.