Quotes from Walt Whitman

Come lovely and soothing death,Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,In the day, in the night, to all, to each,Sooner or later delicate death.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,Out of the Ninth-month midnight.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,No more modest than immodest.Unscrew the locks from the doors!Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.

Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings,Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

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.

Of equality - As if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself - As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.

Nor for you, for one alone,Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,In you I wrap a thousand onward years.

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,Pioneers! O pioneers!

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!But I with mournful tread,Walk the deck my Captain lies,Fallen cold and dead.

Be not ashamed women, ... You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

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

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.

One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,Yet utter the word Democratic, the wordEn-Masse.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.

Produce great men, the rest follows.