Quotes from Walt Whitman

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

O captain! My captain!

To take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and archetypal models — to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future — these, and these only, satisfy the soul.

Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

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.

Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing Night! Night of south winds! Night of the large few stars! Still, nodding night! Mad, naked, Summer Night!

When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Give me nights perfectly quiet... and I looking up at the stars...

...a universe as this, full of all the essential means of happiness... the sun shining, the flowers blooming, the crops growing, the waters running...

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

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.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

Old age: The estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours into the Great Sea.

Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.

Great is Youth--equally great is Old Age--great are Day and Night. Great is Wealth--great is Poverty--great is Expression-great is Silence.

How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!

I have no mockings or arguments; I witness and wait.

If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.

The art of art... is simplicity.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

My little notebooks were beginnings - they were the ground into which I dropped the seed... I would work in this way when I was out in the crowds, then put the stuff together at home.

Ah little recks the laborer, How near his work is holding him to God, The loving Laborer through space and time