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Quotes by Carl Sandburg

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.
– Carl Sandburg
A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
– Carl Sandburg
I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision.
– Carl Sandburg
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
– 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
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
– Carl Sandburg
I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
– Carl Sandburg
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
– Carl Sandburg
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
– Carl Sandburg
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
– Carl Sandburg
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
– Carl Sandburg
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
– 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
To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
– Carl Sandburg
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
– Carl Sandburg
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
– Carl Sandburg
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
– Carl Sandburg
Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
– Carl Sandburg
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.
– Carl Sandburg
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.
– Carl Sandburg
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
– 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 stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
– Carl Sandburg
I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.
– 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
I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.
– Carl Sandburg
Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
– Carl Sandburg
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.
– Carl Sandburg
All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.
– Carl Sandburg
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
– Carl Sandburg