Carl Sandburg Quotes - Page 3

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

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.

And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.

Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.

Come on, you Do you want to live forever?

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?

In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.

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

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.

The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

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.

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.

I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all.

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different. Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural. Then he may understand Shakespeare and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, Michael Faraday and free imaginations Bringing changes into a world resenting change. He will be lonely enough to have time for the work he knows as his own.

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

There is a wolf in me... - I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.

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

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

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

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 to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?'...If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time-the stuff of life

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?