Quotes By Walt Whitman

Produce great men, the rest follows.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

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

The real war will never get in the books.

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

Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

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

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?

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

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

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

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

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

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.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

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

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.

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

Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

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?

When I give, I give myself.

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

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

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

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

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.