Carl Sandburg Quotes
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To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
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Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.
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Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
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Man's life? A candle in the wind, hoar-frost on stone.
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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.
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Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
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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.
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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.
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I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
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I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
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There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
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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.
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Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back. They wear long boots, hard boots.
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Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
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Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
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The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.