Top 200 Carl Sandburg Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.”

— Carl Sandburg

102. “Time is a great teacher, Who can live without hope?”

— Carl Sandburg

103. “Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.”

— Carl Sandburg

104. “People lie because they don’t remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can’t help making a story better than it was the way it happened.”

— Carl Sandburg

105. “Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.”

— Carl Sandburg

106. “There are dreams stronger than death. Men and women die holding these dreams.”

— Carl Sandburg

107. “We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.”

— Carl Sandburg

108. “Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.”

— Carl Sandburg

109. “Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.”

— Carl Sandburg

110. “Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.”

— Carl Sandburg

111. “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.”

— Carl Sandburg

112. “There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere.”

— Carl Sandburg

113. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

114. “Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.”

— Carl Sandburg

115. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

116. “Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.”

— Carl Sandburg

117. “Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it until the test comes.”

— Carl Sandburg

118. “Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’”

— Carl Sandburg

119. “I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.”

— Carl Sandburg

120. “The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.”

— Carl Sandburg

121. “The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.”

— Carl Sandburg

122. “I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.”

— Carl Sandburg

123. “Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.”

— Carl Sandburg

124. “Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.”

— Carl Sandburg

125. “And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.”

— Carl Sandburg

126. “To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.”

— Carl Sandburg

127. “Tongues wrangled dark at a man. He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone. In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.”

— Carl Sandburg

128. “The shovel is the brother to the gun.”

— Carl Sandburg

129. “I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.”

— Carl Sandburg

130. “Somebody’s little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.”

— Carl Sandburg

131. “I am an idealist. I believe in everything – I am only looking for proofs.”

— Carl Sandburg

132. “Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.”

— Carl Sandburg

133. “The impact of television on our culture is just indescribable.”

— Carl Sandburg

134. “Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.”

— Carl Sandburg

135. “Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, ‘Oh!’ and another, ‘How?’”

— Carl Sandburg

136. “Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.”

— Carl Sandburg

137. “So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”

— Carl Sandburg

138. “There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.”

— Carl Sandburg

139. “You know being born is important to you. You know nothing else was ever so important to you.”

— Carl Sandburg

140. “There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.”

— Carl Sandburg

141. “There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.”

— Carl Sandburg

142. “Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.”

— Carl Sandburg

143. “Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.”

— Carl Sandburg

144. “Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.”

— Carl Sandburg

145. “I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.”

— Carl Sandburg

146. “My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.”

— Carl Sandburg

147. “The people know what the land knows.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

149. “Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.”

— Carl Sandburg

150. “Tell no man anything, for no man listens Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.”

— Carl Sandburg