Carl Sandburg Quotes

And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

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.

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.

Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen - maybe.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.

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

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

Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

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

Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

I could safely declare, I am an idealist... I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.

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.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

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

There is only one child in the world and the Child’s name is All Children.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

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.

My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.

Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.

A tree is best measured when it is down - and so it is with people.

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.

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

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

I'll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar.

Somebody's little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.

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.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

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

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off.

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.

I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all.

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

Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.

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

Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.