Quotes from Walt Whitman

And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.

The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

Many a good man I have seen go under.

I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself?

You want to know a sure way to lose money? Buy what's popular and don't know what you are investing in.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.

Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

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

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

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

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

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.

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.

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

Me imperturbe, standing at ease in nature.

I sing the body electric.

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

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems

O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.