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.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

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

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.

Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.

I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

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

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

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

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . 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 to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time__he stuff of life.

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

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

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 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.

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

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

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