Carl Sandburg Quotes

A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

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

All we need to begin with is a #‎ dream that we can do better than before. All we need to have is faith, and that dream will come true. All we need to do is act, and the time for action is now.

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

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

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.

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

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

People lie because they don't remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can't help making a story better than it was the way it happened.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot.

I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.

The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

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

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

What of the Wright boys in Dayton? Just around the corner they had a shop and did a bicycle business-and they wanted to fly for the sake of flying. They were Man the Seeker, Man on a Quest. Money was their last thought, their final absent-minded idea. They threw out a lot of old mistaken measurements and figured new ones that stood up when they took off and held the air and steered a course. They proved that "the faster you go the less power you need."

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

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.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

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.

I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.

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

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

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.

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

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.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

a women is like a tea bag.it's only when she is in hot water that you realize how strong she is.

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.

If I added to their pride of America, I am happy.

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

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.

There is no song to your singing.

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

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

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

Time is the coin of life. Only you can determine how it will be spent.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.

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

Rest is not a word of free people. Rest is a monarchical word.

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