Sandburg Quotes & Sayings

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

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child.
And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child.
"It must be a free child," they said to each other.
"It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."
So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers;
I remember all you forget.
I will die as many times
as you make me over again. — Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn. — Carl Sandburg

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

There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is all children. — Carl Sandburg

Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot. — Carl Sandburg

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

They are lovely pigeons to look at and their eyes are full of lessons to learn.."
They came back yesterday, they came back home," was the answer. "They came back limping on their feet with their toes turned in so far they nearly turned backward.
Every day the last six days I get a telegram, six telegrams from six pigeons
and at last they come home. — Carl Sandburg

Come on, you Do you want to live forever? — Carl Sandburg

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

My sense, although I don't remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg's eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7 — Grace Lee Boggs

The fog comes on little cat feet. — Carl Sandburg

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

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? — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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

The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading Keep Off. — Carl Sandburg

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on. — Carl Sandburg

Let only the young come,
Says the sea.

Let them kiss my face
And hear me.
I am the last word
And I tell
Where storms and stars come from. — Carl Sandburg

We can never possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time. — Carl Sandburg

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

To those who had ordered them to death one of them said: 'We die because the people are asleep ... you will die because the people will awaken'. — Carl Sandburg

Beware of advice - even this. — Carl Sandburg

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather. — Carl Sandburg

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

Happiness does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the event may be. It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the newest, the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg's fog, "comes on little cat feet," often silently, often without our knowing it, too often without our noticing. — Joan D. Chittister

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?' — Carl Sandburg

An inquiry which I once made into the psychology of the Indian sign language with a view to discovering a possible relation between it and Greek manual gesture as displayed in ancient graphic art, led to the conclusion that Indian rhythms arise rather in the centre of self-preservation than of self-consciousness. Which is only another way of saying that poetry is valued primarily by the aboriginal for the reaction it produces within himself rather than for any effect he is able to produce on others by means of it. — Carl Sandburg

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

God, let me remember all good losers. — Carl Sandburg

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. The hard beginnings were forgotten and the struggles farther along. They became satisfied with themselves. Unity and common understanding there had been, enough to overcome rot and dissolution, enough to break through their obstacles. But the mockers came. And the deniers were heard. And vision and hope faded. And the custom of greeting became "What's the use?" And men whose forefathers would go anywhere, holding nothing impossible in the genius of man, joined the mockers and the deniers. They lost sight of what brought them along. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

Night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables. — Carl Sandburg

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

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. — Carl Sandburg

An expert is a damn fool a long way from home. — Carl Sandburg

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away? — Carl Sandburg

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

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

It's going to come out all right - do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass - they know.
They get along - and we'll get along.

Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting
And the letter you wait for won't come, 5
And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray
And the letter I wait for won't come. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

I been a wanderin'
Early and late,
New York City
To the Golden Gate
An' it looks like
I'm never gonna cease my
Wanderin'. — Carl Sandburg

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. — Gore Vidal

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
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,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

Tongues wrangled dark at a man.
He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone.
In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language. — Robert Frost

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." — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the Path on the Rainbow by which the soul climbs; it lays hold on the Friend of the Soul of Man. Such exalted states are held to be protective and curative. Medicine men sing for their patients, and, in times of war, wives gather around the Chief's woman and sing for the success of their warriors. "Calling on Zeus by the names of Victory" as Euripides puts it. — Carl Sandburg

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

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. — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

I speak of new cities and new people
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of tomorrows.
a sky of tomorrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:
Tomorrow is a day.
- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers — Carl Sandburg

Blowing,Blowing
The gray slabs
Will lose you
the winds will flick you away
In a whiff — Carl Sandburg

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. — Carl Sandburg

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

I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days. — Carl Sandburg