Carl Sandburg Quotes

159 Sourced Quotes

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

Carl Sandburg
The Republic is a dream.
Nothing happens unless first a dream.

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

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

Carl Sandburg
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat.
It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
Is it a terrible thing to be lonely?

Carl Sandburg
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

Carl Sandburg
I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way.

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

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

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg
The name of an iron man goes round the world.
It takes a long time to forget an iron man.

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg
Love your neighbour as yourself but don't take down your fence.

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

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg
The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,
"What are those?"
"Soldiers."
"What are soldiers?"
"They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can."
The girl held still and studied.
"Do you know … I know something?"
"Yes, what is it you know?"
"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."

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

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

Carl Sandburg
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.

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

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

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

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

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg