Quotes By Walt Whitman

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

We convince by our presence.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

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 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.

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

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?

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

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.

When I give, I give myself.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

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

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

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Nothing endures but personal qualities.