200 Quotes by 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.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar.

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

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

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

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

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

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

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

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

For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along.

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

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

To be a good loser is to learn how to win.

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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.

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

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.

The fog comes on little cat feet.

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.

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

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

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.

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

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

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

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 says hush: by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now? Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all: the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all.

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

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

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

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

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.

Beware of advice-even this.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.

In the average newspaper there is not a complete suppression of stories that the sacred cows don't want printed. But rather what happens is that the stories get printed with stresses, colorations and emphasis that favor the sacred cows.

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.

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

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

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

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

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

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

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

"There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,

The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.

A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest

corner of it."

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

The past is a bucket of ashes

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.

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

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.

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

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.

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

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

Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

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

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

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

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.”

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

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

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damned hard.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

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

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

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

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

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

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

Nothing happens... but first a dream.

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.

The shovel is the brother to the gun.

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?

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

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

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

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

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

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

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

The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

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

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.

An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.

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

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

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.

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

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

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.

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

Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

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.

Always the path of American destiny has been into the unknown. Always there arose enough reserves of strength, balances of sanity, portions of wisdom to carry the nation through to a fresh start with ever-renewing vitality.

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

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

Come on, you Do you want to live forever?

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

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.

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

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

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

God, let me remember all good losers.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.

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.

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

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

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.

Gather the stars if you wish it so Gather 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.

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

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?'

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

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

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

Life goes before we know what it is. / One fool is enough in any house. / Even God gets tired of too much hallelujah. / Take it easy and live long as brothers.

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.

The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.

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

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

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

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

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.

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

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

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

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.

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

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

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

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

"The peace of great books be for you,

Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,

Bleach of the light of years held in leather."

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

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

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

Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.

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

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

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

Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen - maybe.

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.

Tell me if the lovers are losers... tell me if any get more than the lovers.

The people know what the land knows.

The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on.

The impact of television on our culture is just indescribable.