1 tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

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.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spend it on 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—the stuff of life.

— Carl Sandburg

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.

— Carl Sandburg

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

— Carl Sandburg

Beware of advice—even this.

— Carl Sandburg