Top 44 Carl Sandburg Quotes

There was always the consolation that if I didn’t like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.

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.

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

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.

Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven‘t told the girl you are smitten with her.

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

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

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.

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

Love your neighbor as yourself; but don’t take down the fence.

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

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

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.

Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.

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.

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

I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.

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.

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

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.

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

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

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.

I learned you can’t trust the judgment of good friends.

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.

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

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.

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

There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

To be a good loser is to learn how to win.

We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

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.

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.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

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.

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.