Carl Sandburg Quotes

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.

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.

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.”

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.

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

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

The single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other.

When one has the right swing and enthusiasm, selling is not unlike hunting, a veritable sport. To scare up the game by preliminary talk and to know how long to follow it, to lose your gain through poorly directed argument, to hang on to game that finally eludes, to boldly confront, to quickly circle around, to keep on the trail, tireless and keen, till you have bagged some orders, there is some satisfaction in returning at night, tired of the trail, but proud of the days work done.

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

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.

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.

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

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

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.

Beware of advice-even this.

After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars

Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

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

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

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

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.

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

Now I am here - now read me - give me a name.

The impact of television on our culture is just indescribable.

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

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

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

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

Freedom is baffling: men having it often know not they have it till it is gone and they no longer have it.

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

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

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

Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.

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

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.

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.

If [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Nothing happens... but first a dream.

Come on, you Do you want to live forever?

The past is a bucket of ashes