Top 200 Carl Sandburg Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.”

— Carl Sandburg

52. “The woman named Tomorrow sits with a hairpin in her teeth and takes her time.”

— Carl Sandburg

53. “Freedom is baffling: men having it often know not they have it till it is gone and they no longer have it.”

— Carl Sandburg

54. “Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.”

— Carl Sandburg

55. “Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.”

— Carl Sandburg

56. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

57. “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

58. “Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.”

— Carl Sandburg

59. “God, let me remember all good losers.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

61. “The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.”

— Carl Sandburg

62. “Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely. Love is a fool star. You and a ring of stars may mention my name and then forget me. Love is a fool star.”

— Carl Sandburg

63. “Under the harvest moon, When the soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights, Death, the gray mocker, Comes and whispers to you As a beautiful friend Who remembers.”

— Carl Sandburg

64. “There is an eagle in me that wants to soar...”

— Carl Sandburg

65. “I am the people the mob the crowd the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?”

— Carl Sandburg

66. “Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.”

— Carl Sandburg

67. “Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.”

— Carl Sandburg

68. “I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.”

— Carl Sandburg

69. “Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.”

— Carl Sandburg

70. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

72. “After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars.”

— Carl Sandburg

73. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

74. “The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.”

— Carl Sandburg

75. “Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

77. “In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.”

— Carl Sandburg

78. “An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, “Come and find me, come and find me.””

— Carl Sandburg

79. “Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

81. “Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

83. “Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.”

— Carl Sandburg

84. “Who else speaks for the Family of Man? They are in tune and step with constellations of universal law.”

— Carl Sandburg

85. “Death comes once, let it be easy.”

— Carl Sandburg

86. “I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.”

— Carl Sandburg

87. “Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.”

— Carl Sandburg

88. “Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.”

— Carl Sandburg

89. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

90. “There are some people so lonely, they think God is lonely too-.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

93. “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

94. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

95. “Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

97. “By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.”

— Carl Sandburg

98. “POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

100. “Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.”

— Carl Sandburg