Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg turns time into pocket change and suddenly the abstract becomes painfully spendable. Calling it a coin does two sly things at once: it grants you ownership (it is yours), then immediately reminds you of scarcity (you only get one kind, and it runs out). That tension is the engine of the line. It flatters the reader with agency while warning how easily agency gets outsourced.

The subtext isn’t just self-help self-determination; it’s labor politics in a lyric wrapper. Sandburg wrote in an America remade by industry, schedules, and bosses who literally bought hours. Against that backdrop, “spent” stops being a metaphor and starts sounding like a time clock. He’s nudging you to notice how institutions - employers, family obligations, social expectations, even the churn of public life - can quietly become your accountant. The most dangerous theft here isn’t dramatic; it’s consensual, done through habit, guilt, and distraction.

The line “only you can determine” is also a challenge, not a reassurance. If you’re the sole treasurer, you can’t blame anyone else for the budget. Sandburg’s caution reads like a poet’s version of civic advice: guard your minutes the way a worker guards wages, because both are forms of life converted into units other people can claim.

What makes it work is its clean moral math. No talk of destiny, no mysticism - just a hard, American idiom of value and choice, sharpened into a warning about how easily a life gets monetized by someone else’s priorities.