Walt Whitman Quotes

“I dote on myself. There is a lot of me and all so luscious.”

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”

“Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.”

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

“And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other.”

“Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

“All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch).”

“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds - where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough - a modest living- and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”

“I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.”

“To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.”

“I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

“Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.”

“Simplicity is the glory of expression.”

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

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

“What beauty there is in words; what a lurking curious charm in the sound some words.”

“Dearest comrades, all is over and long gone, But love is not over.”

“What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me, Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns, Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me, Not asking the sky to come down to my goodwill, Scattering if freely forever.”

“O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done.”

“Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.”

“The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.”

“In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed of perfection.”

“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.”

“Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.”

“O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.”