Carl Sandburg Quotes

159 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Carl Sandburg
A tough will counts. So does desire.So does a rich soft wanting.Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

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
Out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.

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

Carl Sandburg
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

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

Carl Sandburg
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.

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

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

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
If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is better in arithmetic, you or your mother?

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

Carl Sandburg
The sea folds away from you like a mystery. You can look and look at it and mystery never leaves it.

Carl Sandburg
The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas.
Soldiers tied rags on their feet.
Red footprints wrote on the snow...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

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

Carl Sandburg