Walt Whitman Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy - government has no such office.

Walt Whitman
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her shall I follow.

Walt Whitman
My rule has been, so far as I could have any rule (I could have no cast-iron rule) - my rule has been, to write what I have to say the best way I can - then lay it aside - taking it up again after some time and reading it afresh - the mind new to it. If there's no jar in the new reading, well and good - that's sufficient for me.

Walt Whitman
The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

Walt Whitman
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

Walt Whitman
An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality.

Walt Whitman
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them

Walt Whitman
I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best!
I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.

Walt Whitman
Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her that it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

Walt Whitman
If there shall be love and content between the father and the son and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father, there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

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

Walt Whitman
The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.

Walt Whitman
O lands! O all so dear to me - what you are, I become part of that, whatever it is.

Walt Whitman
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him - it cannot fail

Walt Whitman
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty, The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes, The gentle soft-born measureless light, The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill'd noon, The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars, Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

Walt Whitman
I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am an encloser of things to be.

Walt Whitman
There will soon be no more priests... They may wait awhile, perhaps a generation or two, dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest.

Walt Whitman
Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.

Walt Whitman
Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)

Walt Whitman
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.

Walt Whitman
Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world - a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious - surely never again to set.

Walt Whitman
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe much unseen is also here

Walt Whitman
Why who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know nothing else but miracles, whether they be animals feeding in the fields, Or, birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These, with the rest, one and all, are to me, miracles.

Walt Whitman
The universe is a procession with measured and beautiful motion.

Walt Whitman
I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, All all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.

Walt Whitman
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side...The Bending forward and backward of the rowers...

Walt Whitman
We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

Walt Whitman
But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.

Walt Whitman
For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable.

Walt Whitman
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.

Walt Whitman