Quotes from Walt Whitman

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul; And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

LET us twain walk aside from the rest; Now we are together privately, do you discard ceremony, Come! vouchsafe to me what has yet been vouchsafed to none—Tell me the whole story, Tell me what you would not tell your brother, wife, husband, or physician.

To be in any form, what is that? (round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,) If nothing lay more develop'd the quahung in it's callous shell were enough. Mine is no callous shell. I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and I am happy, to touch my person to someone else's is about as much as I can stand.

What will be will be well — for what is is well, To take interest is well, and not to take interest is well.

If you see a good deal remarkable in me I see just as much remarkable in you.

The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself, and makes one.

I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no, And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy?

It seems to me that everything in the light and air ought to be happy; / Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize.

A Glimpse A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

O, to be a ruler of life-- not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes-- no ennui-- no more complaints or scornful criticisms. O me repellent and ugly, O to these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving my interior Soul impregnable, And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.

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?

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. -from Song of Myself

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content.

Studying life, eh! Let him take care, studying human life is looking at the stars. If you look too close, there is a dazzle.

henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.

And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. - Song of Myself : 6

Sea of stretch'd ground-swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd yet always-ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life, Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you.