Walt Whitman Quotes

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

My ties and ballasts leave me - I travel - I sail - My elbows rest in the sea-gaps. I skirt the sierras. My palms cover continents - I am afoot with my vision.

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people, and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools- democracy in all public and private life.

Long and long has the grass been growing,Long and long has the rain been falling,Long has the globe been rolling round.

Charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything.

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs.

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him - it cannot fail

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.

What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

I exist as I am, that is enough.

O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee.

I accept reality and dare not question it.

The work for giants...to serve well the guns!

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.

There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate with the theory of the earth.

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation: The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer, I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.

O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you; As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you, Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results.

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

Have you not learned the most in your life from those with whom you disagreed - those who saw it differently from you?

not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

I refuse putting from me the best that I am.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.

Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn'd love; But now I think there is no unreturn'd love—the pay is certain, one way or another; (I loved a certain person ardently, and my love was not return'd; Yet out of that, I have written these songs.)

In all people I see myself - none more, and not one a barleycorn less; And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death, it is form, union, plan, it is eternal life, it is happiness.

When I give, I give myself.

The ecstasy is so short but the forgetting is so long.

Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?

I will You, in all, Myself, with promise to never desert you, To which I sign my name.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

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

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

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