Walt Whitman Quotes

“Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”

“Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.”

“The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them”

“Under the specious pretext of effecting 'the happiness of the whole community,' nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government has been carried through.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”

“The real war will never get in the books.”

“The moon gives you light, and the bugles and the drums give you music, and my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, my heart gives you love.”

“Out of every fruition of success, no matter what, comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.”

“I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be.”

“I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.”

“A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.”

“I permit to speak at every hazard,Nature without check with original energy”

“The city sleeps and the country sleeps, the living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, the old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; and these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, and such as it is to be of these more or less I am, and of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

“And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.”

“Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.”

“There will never be any more perfection than there is now.”

“Forsake all inhibitions, Pursue thy dreams.”

“There was a child went forth everyday, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day... or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

“If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.”

“But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.”

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine everything could be worse but isn't and so we are justified in being grateful - and shadows everything could be better but isn't and so it is easy to be bitter 'unless you decide to look on the bright side will fall behind you.”

“Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed.”

“Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions, Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I Casually met there who detained me for love of me, Day by day and night by night we were together—all else Has long been forgotten by me, I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung To me, Again we wander, we love, we separate again, Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go, I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.”

“I know I am deathless…We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.”