Carl Sandburg – 30 Quotes

30 Quotes by Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.

– Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

– Carl Sandburg

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.

– Carl Sandburg

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– 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

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

– Carl Sandburg

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

– 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

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

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

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

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.

– 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

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