Carl Sandburg Quotes

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

~ Carl Sandburg

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.

~ Carl Sandburg

Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.

~ Carl Sandburg

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.

~ Carl Sandburg

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.

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

~ Carl Sandburg

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.

~ Carl Sandburg

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed God knows which was right.

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ 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

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.

~ Carl Sandburg

Nothing happens unless first a dream.

~ Carl Sandburg

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

~ Carl Sandburg

I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers,I remember all you forget.I will die as many timesas 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 GettysburgAnd 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 speak of new cities and new peopleI 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 worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers

~ Carl Sandburg

Beware of advice—even this.

~ 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

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.

~ Carl Sandburg

Stormy husky brawling City of the Big Shoulders.

~ 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.

~ Carl Sandburg

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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.

~ Carl Sandburg

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.

~ Carl Sandburg

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg

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

~ Carl Sandburg