Carl Sandburg Quotes

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Carl Sandburg

Profession : Poet

Birth : January 6, 1878

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

Carl Sandburg

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

Carl Sandburg

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.

Carl Sandburg

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

Carl Sandburg

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

Carl Sandburg

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

Carl Sandburg

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

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

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

Carl Sandburg

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

Carl Sandburg

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

Carl Sandburg

Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.

Carl Sandburg

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.

Carl Sandburg

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.

Carl Sandburg

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Carl Sandburg

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

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

Carl Sandburg

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

Carl Sandburg