Quotes About Beauty

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

Song of myself Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset--earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow'd earth--rich apple-blossom'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes.

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

Be composed--be at ease with me--I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature, Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;

The earth never tires, The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Quédate hoy conmigo, vive conmigo un día y una noche y te mostraré el origen de todos los poemas.

Sun so generous it shall be you- Leaves of Grass

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

To me, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as         profound as any.

Human bodies are words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped,         natural, gay;

Though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not. - from I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise.

Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem

Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom'd night—press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! Still nodding night—mad naked summer night. — Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself, 21," Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition (BOMC, 1992)

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

I depart as air .... I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty, See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights---not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite or anything else---is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.