Nothing happens unless first a dream.
– Carl Sandburg
The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.
– Carl Sandburg
A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.
– 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
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
– Carl Sandburg
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.
– Carl Sandburg
There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere.
– Carl Sandburg
Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
– 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
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a
red-headed child.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
– Carl Sandburg
All politicians should have three hats: One to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one
to pull rabbits out of if elected.
– Carl Sandburg
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
– Carl Sandburg
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
– Carl Sandburg
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.
– Carl Sandburg
To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
– Carl Sandburg
Love your neighbor as yourself; but don’t take down the fence.
– 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
Revolt and terror pay a price. Order and law have a cost.
– Carl Sandburg
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
We may pull apart the petals of a rose or make chemical analysis of its perfume, but the
mystic beauty of its form and odor is still a secret, locked in to where we have no keys.
– Carl Sandburg
A book is never a masterpiece: It becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
– Carl Sandburg
A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A
baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this
house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive.
Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a
newborn baby.
– Carl Sandburg
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first
awake.
– Carl Sandburg
Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
– Carl Sandburg
Count reminiscenes like money.
– Carl Sandburg
Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them
back.
– Carl Sandburg
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
– 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
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
– 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 have it when the next test comes.
– Carl Sandburg
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
– 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
A man must find time for himself.
– Carl Sandburg
I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on the way.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about
what was seen during a moment.
– 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
The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.
– Carl Sandburg
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.
– Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
– Carl Sandburg
Each man pictures his hell or heaven different.
– Carl Sandburg
It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to
sit on a rock in the forest and ask, “Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?”
– Carl Sandburg
There are ten men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
– Carl Sandburg
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
– Carl Sandburg
It is the business of little minds to shrink.
– Carl Sandburg
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, nor 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
I’m either going to be a writer or a bum.
– Carl Sandburg
To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.
– Carl Sandburg
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.
– Carl Sandburg
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
– Carl Sandburg