Carl Sandburg

“There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.”

“The greatest cunning is to have none at all.”

“Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.”

“I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.”

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

“The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.”

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

“I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or...”

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

“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.”

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

“I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.”

“I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.”

“Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence.”

“I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.”