Carl Sandburg > Quotes

“A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.”
― Carl Sandburg

“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.”
― Carl Sandburg

“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, Honey and Salt

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”
― Carl Sandburg, The Complete Poems

“Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”
― Carl Sandburg

“The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Gather the stars if you wish it so
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women.
Gather for keeping years and years.
And then...
Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye.
Let the stars and songs go.
Let the faces and years go.
Loosen your hands and say good-bye.”
― Carl Sandburg

“I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way.”
― Carl Sandburg, Breathing Tokens

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.”
― Carl Sandburg

“To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love.”
― Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems

“Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.
He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.”
― Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes

“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

“Let your heart look
on white sea spray
and be lonely.

Love is a fool star.

You and a ring of stars
may mention my name
and then forget me.

Love is a fool star.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
― Carl Sandburg

“It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?”
― Carl Sandburg

“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

“And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”
― Carl Sandburg

“In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning”
― Carl Sandburg

“Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Tell no man anything, for no man listens
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.”
― Carl Sandburg

“By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.”
― Carl Sandburg

“A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. 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 plants, 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 devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”
― Carl Sandburg

“The past is a bucket of ashes”
― Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers

“Life is an onion - you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.”
― Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock

“I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.”
― Carl Sandburg

“God, let me remember all good losers.”
― Carl Sandburg

“After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars”
― Carl Sandburg

“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

“I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it”
― Carl Sandburg

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

“We can never possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves.
They flickered out saying:
"It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.”
― Carl Sandburg

“A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.”
― Carl Sandburg

“I am an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”
― Carl Sandburg

“There is only one child in the world and the Child’s name is All Children.”
― Carl Sandburg

“I've written some poetry I don't understand myself”
― Carl Sandburg

“Didn't you tie the mittens on her feet (Wednesday Evening's) extra special nice?
Yes--she is an extra special nice pigeon. She cries for pity when she wants pity. And she shuts her eyes when she doesn't want to look at you. And if you look deep in her eyes when her eyes are open you will see lights there exactly like the lights on the pastures and the meadows when the mist is drifting on a Wednesday evening just between the twilight and gloaming.”
― Carl Sandburg, Rootabaga Stories

“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

“There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always.
If the music dies down there is a silence.
Almost the same as the movement of music.
To know silence perfectly is to know music.”
― Carl Sandburg, Good Morning, America

“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning...proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”
― Carl Sandburg

“I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Our lives are like a candle in the wind.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Revolt and terror pay a price.
Order and law have a cost.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Le poete est un animal marin qui vit sur terre et qui voudrait voler.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.”
― Carl Sandburg

“I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.”
― Carl Sandburg

“The shovel is brother to the gun.”
― Carl Sandburg