Carl Sandburg quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.

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

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

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

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

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.

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

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

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

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

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

Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.

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

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

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

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

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

Give me hunger,O you gods that sit and giveThe world its orders.Give me hunger, pain and want,Shut me out with shame and failureFrom your doors of gold and fame,Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!But leave me a little love,A voice to speak to me in the day end,A hand to touch me in the dark roomBreaking the long loneliness."

Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

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.

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

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

The past is a bucket of ashes

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

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

My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.

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

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.

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.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

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.

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

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.

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

The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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."

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

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

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.

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

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

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

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

The fog comes on little cat feet.

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

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

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

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

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

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.

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Tongues wrangled dark at a man. He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone. In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

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

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

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

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

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.

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Tell no man anything, for no man listensYet hold thy lips ready to speak.

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.

Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.

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

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

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar...

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

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

The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot.

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.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

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

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

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

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.

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

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.

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.