110+ Carl Sandburg Quotes On Nature, Poetry And Evocative

Carl Sandburg was an American poet, writer, and editor who was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878. He is best known for his poems about the people and places of the Midwest, as well as his biography of Abraham Lincoln. His works also include children's poetry, plays, and folk songs, and he was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his writing. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Carl Sandburg on life, nature, poetry.

Top 10 Carl Sandburg Quotes

1. Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.
2. Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
3. There is an eagle in me that wants to soar.
4. 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.
5. Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
6. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
7. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
8. Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.
9. Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence.
10. Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

Carl Sandburg Image Quotes

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg

Nothing happens unless first we dream. — Carl Sandburg

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something. — Carl Sandburg

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way. — Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg Short Quotes

• Nothing happens unless first we dream.
• Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
• The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.
• I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
• By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
• Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.
• To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
• In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.
• I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
• The fog comes on little cat feet.

Carl Sandburg Quotes About Life

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

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. — Carl Sandburg

Time is the coin of life. Only you can determine how it will be spent. — Carl Sandburg

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me. — 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

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

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

All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker. — Carl Sandburg

A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies. — Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg Quotes About Poetry

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg

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

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on. — Carl Sandburg

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

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. — Carl Sandburg

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

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. — Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg Quotes About Years

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors. — Carl Sandburg

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years. — 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

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

I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn't have picked a better companion. — Carl Sandburg

Gather the stars if you wish it so Gather the songs and keep them. Gather the faces of women. Gather for keeping years and years. And then... Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye. Let the stars and songs go. Let the faces and years go. Loosen your hands and say good-bye. — Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg Quotes About Read

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

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

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

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct. — 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

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. — Carl Sandburg

Now I am here - now read me - give me a name. — Carl Sandburg

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help. — Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg Quotes About People

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

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted. — Carl Sandburg

A tree is best measured when it is down - and so it is with people. — 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

The people know what the land knows. — Carl Sandburg

The people will live on.The learning and blundering people will live on. — Carl Sandburg

If she America forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution. — 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

There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere — Carl Sandburg

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

Carl Sandburg Famous Quotes And Sayings

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg

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

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence. — 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

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

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. — Carl Sandburg

Under the harvest moon, When the soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights, Death, the gray mocker, Comes and whispers to you As a beautiful friend Who remembers. — Carl Sandburg

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something. — Carl Sandburg

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way. — Carl Sandburg

Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows. — 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

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

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work. — 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

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. — 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

An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, "Come and find me, come and find me." — Carl Sandburg

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to. — Carl Sandburg

A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected. — Carl Sandburg

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen. — Carl Sandburg

Now is the time. It is never too late to start something. — 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

Who else speaks for the Family of Man? They are in tune and step with constellations of universal law. — Carl Sandburg

It is the business of little minds to shrink. — Carl Sandburg

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it until the test comes. — 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

Time is the coin of our live. We must take care how we spend it. — Carl Sandburg

Man is a long time coming. Man will yet win. Brother may yet line up with brother: This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.There are men who can't be bought. — 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

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the women don't get you then the whiskey must. — Carl Sandburg

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

Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going? — 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

I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends. — Carl Sandburg

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

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny. — Carl Sandburg

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

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it. — 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

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

The fog comes on little cat feet.It sits lookingover harbor and cityon silent haunchesand then moves on. — 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

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

Nothing happens unless first a dream. — Carl Sandburg

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child. — Carl Sandburg

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

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

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

A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes. — Carl Sandburg

a women is like a tea bag.it's only when she is in hot water that you realize how strong she is. — Carl Sandburg

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

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you wake in the morning. — Carl Sandburg

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

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damned hard. — Carl Sandburg

What if they gave a war and nobody came? — Carl Sandburg

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

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself. — Carl Sandburg

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman. — Carl Sandburg

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written. — Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all. — Carl Sandburg

Life Lessons by Carl Sandburg

1. Carl Sandburg's poetry emphasizes the importance of taking time to appreciate the beauty of the world around us, and to recognize the value of our own individual experiences.
2. His work also encourages us to think critically about the world, and to strive for justice and equality for all.
3. Finally, Sandburg's poetry reminds us to be humble and to recognize the power of our collective humanity.