Carl Sandburg Quotes

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg
The past is a bucket of ashes so live not in your yesterdays nor just for tomorrow but in the here and now.
Carl Sandburg
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
1 tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
Carl Sandburg
I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.
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
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
1 tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
Carl Sandburg
I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.
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
Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down the fence.
Carl Sandburg
Hope is an echo hope ties itself yonder yonder.
Carl Sandburg
There are people who want to be everywhere at once and they get nowhere.
Carl Sandburg
Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure if 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.
Carl Sandburg
Stormy husky brawling City of the Big Shoulders.
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
Let only the young come, Says the sea. Let them kiss my face And hear me. I am the last word And I tell Where storms and stars come from.
Carl Sandburg
The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.
Carl Sandburg
So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child. And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child. "It must be a free child," they said to each other. "It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea.
Carl Sandburg
Beware of advice—even this.
Carl Sandburg
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
Carl Sandburg
I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
Someday they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers
Carl Sandburg
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning
Carl Sandburg
I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.
Carl Sandburg
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.
Carl Sandburg
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.Shovel them under and let me work-- I am the grass; I cover all.And pile them high at GettysburgAnd pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.Shovel them under and let me work.Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
Carl Sandburg
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Carl Sandburg
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg
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.
Carl Sandburg
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it runs by.
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
To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.
Carl Sandburg
One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.
Carl Sandburg
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.
Carl Sandburg
Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.
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
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
Carl Sandburg
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
Gather the stars if you wish it soGather 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
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
Carl Sandburg
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.
Carl Sandburg
Tell no man anything, for no man listensYet hold thy lips ready to speak.
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
Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Carl Sandburg
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.
Carl Sandburg
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg