Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg gives the sea a mouth and then dares you to admit you already know what it’s saying. “Polite people never repeat” is a sly moral frame: civilization depends on editing reality into acceptable phrases, while the ocean keeps blurting out the raw version. The move is classic Sandburg - plainspoken diction that smuggles in a hard, almost proletarian worldview. He doesn’t dress the sea in Romantic lace; he hands it “scavenger slang,” the vocabulary of dockyards, carcasses, wreckage, and work.

The subtext is less about water than about class and decorum. “Polite” reads like an upper-room category: the people who can afford euphemism. The sea, by contrast, is unsentimental labor. It takes what it can, returns what it won’t keep, and refuses the human preference for tidy narratives. Calling it a “colossal scavenger” collapses grandeur into appetite; the ocean isn’t sublime because it’s noble, it’s sublime because it’s indifferent. “Has no respect” lands like a punchline and an accusation - respect is a social contract, and nature didn’t sign it.

Context matters: Sandburg came up amid American industrial modernity, writing in a voice attuned to factories, freight yards, and the rough music of ordinary speech. Here, the sea becomes an emblem of the unruly real - a force that makes a mockery of refinement, and a reminder that beneath our manners sits a world that won’t be domesticated.