Quotes By Carl Sandburg

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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