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I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained. I stand and look at them long and long.
WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.
WALT WHITMAN, Notes Left Over
- Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
- Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
- All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
- All the governments, judges, gods.
WALT WHITMAN, A Woman Waits for Me
- Press close bare-bosom'd night -- press close magnetic nourishing night!
- Night of south winds -- night of the large few stars!
- Still nodding night -- mad naked summer night.
WALT WHITMAN, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
WALT WHITMAN, Song of the Open Road
The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
WALT WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass
- Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
- That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
- For my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead,
- I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,
- Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
WALT WHITMAN, Reconciliation
- A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
- If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the
- whole world.
WALT WHITMAN, "Song of the Broad-Axe"
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
WALT WHITMAN, "One Hour to Madness and Joy", Leaves of Grass
Strong and content I travel the open road.
WALT WHITMAN, Song of the Open Road
- I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
- And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
- And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
- And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
- And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
- And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
- And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
WALT WHITMAN, "Song of Myself", Leaves of Grass
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
WALT WHITMAN, Song of Myself
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
WALT WHITMAN, "Manhattan Faces"
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals; Despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people; Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men; Go freely with powerful, uneducated persons and with the young and with mothers of families; Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told in a school or church or in any book; Dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
WALT WHITMAN, preface, Leaves of Grass
I know I am deathless...
We have thus far exhausted
trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and
trillions ahead of them
WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
As to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.
WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
WALT WHITMAN, "Song of the Broad-Axe", Leaves of Grass
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim -- the rocks -- the motion of the waves -- the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
WALT WHITMAN,"Miracles", Leaves of Grass
Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded
WALT WHITMAN, "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances"
I like the scientific spirit--the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine--it always keeps the way beyond open--always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake--after a wrong guess.
WALT WHITMAN, Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations
Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)--Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
WALT WHITMAN, Democratic Vistas
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