Quotes by Carl Sandburg
I'm an idealist.
I don't know where I'm going,
but I'm on my way.
~Carl Sandburg~
Time is the coin of your life.
It is the only coin you have,
and only you can determine
how it will be spent.
Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
~Carl Sandburg~
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes,
one condition may always be found;
they forgot where they came from.
They lost sight of what had brought them along.
~Carl Sandburg~
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.
I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn't have picked a better companion. In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you wake in the morning. Men of ideas vanish first when freedom vanishes.
~Carl Sandburg~
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
~Carl Sandburg~
Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at TV. They had "loneliness" and knew what to do with it. They knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.
~Carl Sandburg~
The impact of television on our culture
is...indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.
~Carl Sandburg~
The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.
~Carl Sandburg~
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~
I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart. Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at task's undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.
~Carl Sandburg~
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.
~Carl Sandburg~
One of the greatest necessities in America
is to discover creative solitude.
~Carl Sandburg~
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."
~Carl Sandburg~
Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth
who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.
~Carl Sandburg about Abraham Lincoln~
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.
Genius is the talent of a dead man.
~Carl Sandburg~
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.
~Carl Sandburg~
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~
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~
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
~Carl Sandburg~
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
~Carl Sandburg~
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
~Carl Sandburg~
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.
~Carl Sandburg~
song playing....I'll Remember You