Quotes by Walt Whitman
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Great is Youth -- equally great is Old Age -- great are Day and Night.
Great is Wealth -- great is Poverty -- great is Expression-great is Silence.

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.

What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires -- how many aspirations after goodness and truth -- how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.

Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as
now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

The real war will never get in the books.

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

I think it is lost.....but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost .

We were together. I forget the rest.

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.

God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean
But I shall be good health to you nonetheless
And filter and fibre your blood.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I tramp a perpetual journey.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness -- ignorance, credulity -- helps your enjoyment of these things.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes.

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself.

Resist much, obey little.

In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.

All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes -- but is that all?

There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.

Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

When I give, I give myself.

Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

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.

Nothing endures but personal qualities.

O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.

Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.

Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on -- have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear -- what remains? Nature remains.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

I accept reality and dare not question it.

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

Be curious, not judgmental.