Top 200 Carl Sandburg Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.”

— Carl Sandburg

152. “What is there more of in the world than anything else? Ends.”

— Carl Sandburg

153. “Now I am here – now read me – give me a name.”

— Carl Sandburg

154. “Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.”

— Carl Sandburg

155. “Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.”

— Carl Sandburg

156. “In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.”

— Carl Sandburg

157. “Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.”

— Carl Sandburg

158. “Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.”

— Carl Sandburg

159. “Time is the coin of our live. We must take care how we spend it.”

— Carl Sandburg

160. “Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.”

— Carl Sandburg

161. “Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.”

— Carl Sandburg

162. “To know silence perfectly is to know music.”

— Carl Sandburg

163. “I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn’t have picked a better companion.”

— Carl Sandburg

164. “When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.”

— Carl Sandburg

165. “There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.”

— Carl Sandburg

166. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

167. “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

168. “It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.”

— Carl Sandburg

169. “Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.”

— Carl Sandburg

170. “The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.”

— Carl Sandburg

171. “I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.”

— Carl Sandburg

172. “I learned you can’t trust the judgment of good friends.”

— Carl Sandburg

173. “Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.”

— Carl Sandburg

174. “Revolt and terror pay a price. Order and law have a cost.”

— Carl Sandburg

175. “Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.”

— Carl Sandburg

176. “Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.”

— Carl Sandburg

177. “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

178. “And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.”

— Carl Sandburg

179. “Rest is not a word of free people. Rest is a monarchical word.”

— Carl Sandburg

180. “There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.”

— Carl Sandburg

181. “Have I, have you, been too silent? Is there an easy crime of silence?”

— Carl Sandburg

182. “I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.”

— Carl Sandburg

183. “Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you’ll never read him unless you consider rainbows.”

— Carl Sandburg

184. “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.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

186. “I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.”

— Carl Sandburg

187. “Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.”

— Carl Sandburg

188. “A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.”

— Carl Sandburg

189. “There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.”

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

191. “In the average newspaper there is not a complete suppression of stories that the sacred cows don’t want printed. But rather what happens is that the stories get printed with stresses, colorations and emphasis that favor the sacred cows.”

— Carl Sandburg

192. “We don’t have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.”

— Carl Sandburg

193. “If I added to their pride of America, I am happy.”

— Carl Sandburg

194. “The greatest cunning is to have none at all.”

— Carl Sandburg

195. “It is the business of little minds to shrink.”

— Carl Sandburg

196. “Music is any sound you want to go on and on.”

— Carl Sandburg

197. “All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.”

— Carl Sandburg

198. “Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.”

— Carl Sandburg

199. “A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.”

— Carl Sandburg

200. “What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?”

— Carl Sandburg