Carl Sandburg Quotes

Be careful with your words, once they are said, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten.

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.

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

For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along.

Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell

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

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

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.

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.

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

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

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?

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.

Now is the time. It is never too late to start something.

A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.

Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.

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

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

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

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

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