Quotes By 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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

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.

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

There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.

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.

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.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.

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

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