Carl Sandburg

“The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.”

“To be a good loser is to learn how to win.”

“I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.”

“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.”

“I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.”

“The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.”

“In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.”

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.”

“When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.”

“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.”

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

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”

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

“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.”

“Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.”

“All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.”

“We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.”

“Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”

“I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.”

“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.”