Carl Sandburg Top 10 Quotes


10

Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.

Carl Sandburg (Incidentals, 1904)

9

A man must find time for himself.

Carl Sandburg

8

Each man pictures his hell or heaven different.

Carl Sandburg (Good Morning America)

7

Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Carl Sandburg

6

I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.

Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)

5

Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.

Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)

4

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.

Carl Sandburg (Under the Harvest Moon, 1916)

3

We may pull apart the petals of a rose or make chemical analysis of its perfume, but the mystic beauty of its form and odor is still a secret, locked in to where we have no keys.

Carl Sandburg (Incidentals, 1904)

2

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong 
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. 
Tell him to be different from other people 
if it comes natural and easy being different. 
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. 
Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural. 
Then he may understand Shakespeare 
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, 
Michael Faraday and free imaginations 
Bringing changes into a world resenting change. 
He will be lonely enough 
to have time for the work 
he knows as his own.

Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes, 1936)

1

It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

Carl Sandburg (Letter to his friend Ralph McGill)

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Carl Sandburg Biography

Born: January 6, 1878
Died: July 22, 1967

Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor. He is most famous and known for his award-winning poetry and biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Notable Works

Incidentals (1904)
Chicago Poems
(1916)
Rootabaga Stories (1922)
The People, Yes (1936)
The Family of Man (1955)


All Quotations by Carl Sandburg