Top 200 Carl Sandburg Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.”

— Carl Sandburg

202. “There was always the consolation that if I didn’t like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.”

— Carl Sandburg

203. “I’ll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.”

— Carl Sandburg

204. “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

205. “There is no song to your singing.”

— Carl Sandburg

206. “Always the path of American destiny has been into the unknown. Always there arose enough reserves of strength, balances of sanity, portions of wisdom to carry the nation through to a fresh start with ever-renewing vitality.”

— Carl Sandburg

207. “You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.”

— Carl Sandburg

208. “Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.”

— Carl Sandburg

209. “The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.”

— Carl Sandburg

210. “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

211. “Let us go out in the fog, John, let us roll up our raincoat collars and go on the streets where men are sneering at the kings.”

— Carl Sandburg

212. “I am! I have come through! I belong!”

— Carl Sandburg

213. “I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.”

— Carl Sandburg

214. “All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.”

— Carl Sandburg

215. “I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn’t live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.”

— Carl Sandburg

216. “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

217. “I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.”

— Carl Sandburg

218. “Le poete est un animal marin qui vit sur terre et qui voudrait voler.”

— Carl Sandburg

219. “The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.”

— Carl Sandburg

220. “I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.”

— Carl Sandburg

221. “Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.”

— Carl Sandburg

222. “We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.”

— Carl Sandburg

223. “I’m either going to be a writer or a bum.”

— Carl Sandburg

224. “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”

— Carl Sandburg

225. “I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.”

— Carl Sandburg

226. “Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen – maybe.”

— Carl Sandburg

227. “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

228. “Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.”

— Carl Sandburg

229. “Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven’t told the girl you are smitten with her.”

— Carl Sandburg

230. “The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.”

— Carl Sandburg

231. “I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.”

— Carl Sandburg

232. “I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land.”

— Carl Sandburg

233. “The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.”

— Carl Sandburg

234. “Poetry is the Path on the Rainbow by which the soul climbs; it lays hold on the Friend of the Soul of Man. Such exalted states are held to be protective and curative. Medicine men sing for their patients, and, in times of war, wives gather around the Chief’s woman and sing for the success of their warriors. “Calling on Zeus by the names of Victory” as Euripides puts it.”

— Carl Sandburg

235. “You must expect to be in several lost causes before you die.”

— Carl Sandburg

236. “Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one another’s throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.”

— Carl Sandburg

237. “Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.”

— Carl Sandburg