Carl Sandburg Quotations | Page 3

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

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.

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.

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

Faith is indispensable, and the world at times does not seem to have quite enough of it. It can and has accomplished what seems to be the impossible. Wars have been started and men and nations lost for the lack of it. Faith starts from the individual and builds men and nations. America was built by and on the faith of our ancestors.

The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

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

The fog comes on little cat feet.

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 Gettysburg. And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years,and passengers ask the conductor- What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.

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

I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.

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

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.

I remember the Chillicothe ballplayers grappling the Long Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown. And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.

The shovel is the brother to the gun.

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

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

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

The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.

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.

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.

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

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

Revolt and terror pay a price. Order and law have a cost.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

There is only one child in the world and the Child’s name is All Children.

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

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

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.

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

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.

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

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

If [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.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different. Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural. Then he may understand Shakespeare and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, Michael Faraday and free imaginations Bringing changes into a world resenting change. He will be lonely enough to have time for the work he knows as his own.

Nothing happens... but first a dream.

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

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

All we need to begin with is a #‎ dream that we can do better than before. All we need to have is faith, and that dream will come true. All we need to do is act, and the time for action is now.

Beware of advice-even this.

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

There are dreams stronger than death. Men and women die holding these dreams.

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.

After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars

Didn't you tie the mittens on her feet (Wednesday Evening's) extra special nice? Yes--she is an extra special nice pigeon. She cries for pity when she wants pity. And she shuts her eyes when she doesn't want to look at you. And if you look deep in her eyes when her eyes are open you will see lights there exactly like the lights on the pastures and the meadows when the mist is drifting on a Wednesday evening just between the twilight and gloaming.

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

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

There is a wolf in me... - I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

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

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.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

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.

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

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

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

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

There are people who want to be everywhere at once and they seem to get nowhere

Men of ideas vanish first when freedom vanishes.

I am the people - the mob - the crowd - the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

If 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.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,/ Shovel them under and let me work -/ I am the grass; I cover all.

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar

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?

Why is there always a secret singing when a lawyer cashes in? Why does a hearse horse snicker hauling a lawyer away?

Sandburg's retelling of Lincoln's attendance at an evangelist rally led by Peter Cartwright in 1846, in response to accusations by Cartwright's followers that he was an "infidel" - Cartwright was his opponent in his race for Congress:

The republic is a dream, Nothing happens unless first a dream

All politicians should have 3 hats -- one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. 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 planes 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 devises and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable.

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

(Chicago) 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

The machine yes, the machine, never wastes anybody's time, never watches the foreman, never talks back

The fog comes/ on little cat feet./ It sits looking over/ harbor and city/ on silent haunches/ and then moves on.