Quotes By Walt Whitman

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

And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

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

Produce great men, the rest follows.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

We convince by our presence.

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.

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.

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

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

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

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?

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