Carl Sandburg Quotes

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.

The Republic is a dream. Nothing happens unless first a dream.

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

Here is dust remembers it was a rose
one time and lay in a woman’s hair.
Here is dust remembers it was a woman
one time and in her hair lay a rose.
Oh things one time dust, what else now is it
you dream and remember of old days? — Carl Sandburg, “Dust,” The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition January 6, 2003) Originally published 1950.

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.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud

The shovel is brother to the gun.

Beware of advice — even this.

There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is all children.

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

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin... in the dust, in the cool tombs.

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

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.