Quotes from Walt Whitman

Do not descend amongst professors or capitalists.

Clear and sweet is my soul . . . . and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack

while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

Like a stone dropped into a pond, an article of that sort may spread out its concentric circles of consequences.

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

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.

he can make every word he speaks draw blood

Stout as a horse

The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Expression of speech .. in what is written or said forget not that silence is also expressive, That anguish as hot as the hottest and contempt as cold as the coldest may be without words, That the true adoration is likewise without words and without kneeling.

With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry's utmost exactness.

And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with them, And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere, even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be satisfied.

Victory, union, faith, identity, time, The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports. This, then, is life; Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. -from Starting from Paumanok

The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep, The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps, The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep? And the murder'd person, how does he sleep?

I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning every one I meet

The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body, if not more.

O sight of pity, shame and dole! O fearful thought - a convict soul.

Caution seldom goes far enough.

The President is up there in the White House for you . . . . it is not you who are here for him

What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself, All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.

The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla, Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names. -from Starting from Paumanok

Mal sirven a la libertad aquellos cuya buena intención se ve frustrada por un fracaso o dos o cualquier número de fracasos, o por la indiferencia despreocupada o la ingratitud de la gente, o por el triste espectáculo de las garras del poder, o si aparecen por el medio soldados y cañones o el código penal.

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