Carl Sandburg

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Nothing happens unless first a dream.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Tell no man anything, for no man listensYet hold thy lips ready to speak.

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; they walk off proud; they can__ hear you calling -Look out how you use proud words.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique _ but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby _ with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.

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

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.

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.

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.

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

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