Carl Sandburg Quotes

We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.

Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

God, let me remember all good losers.

The shovel is the brother to the gun.

What is there more of in the world than anything else? Ends.

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence.

It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.

A tough will counts. So does desire.So does a rich soft wanting.Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, "Come and find me, come and find me."

Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.

Time is the coin of our live. We must take care how we spend it.

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.

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.

I remember the Chillicothe ballplayers grappling the Long Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown. And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.

Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.

The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.

Be careful with your words, once they are said, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten.

Now is the time. It is never too late to start something.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

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.

Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.

There are ten men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

Faith is indispensable, and the world at times does not seem to have quite enough of it. It can and has accomplished what seems to be the impossible. Wars have been started and men and nations lost for the lack of it. Faith starts from the individual and builds men and nations. America was built by and on the faith of our ancestors.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

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?

So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.

You know being born is important to you. You know nothing else was ever so important to you.

Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.

I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.

Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.

Tell no man anything, for no man listens Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

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.

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.