Quotes by Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.
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.
All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.
Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
During my four years at Lombard I never knew of a student getting drunk.
There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
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 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.
Every other day I drove my two bay horses back and forth along Brooks Street for exercise.
My main lecture was titled, The American Vagabond, which I thought sounded more attractive than just plain, Walt Whitman.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
I am Swedish. My father and mother came from Sweden. I wondered if German, Italian, Polish upperclassmen sometimes felt a call of blood like that.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
The Old Man was thinking of the profit that did come to him from selling the house and lot, but he couldn't have worked the way he did unless he truly enjoyed work for the sake of work itself.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
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.
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.
For years the Chicago redlight district was to go on as a known and recognized business operation.
We had one Japanese student, a theolog, learning how to go back to Tokyo or Hiroshima and preach to the Nipponese that God loves everybody.
