Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)

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We consider bibles and religions divine I do not say they are not divine. I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still. It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.

Walt Whitman
What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

Walt Whitman
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

Walt Whitman
Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

Walt Whitman
When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, My breath will not be obedient to its organs, I become a dumb man.

Walt Whitman
More and more too, the old name absorbs into me. Mannahatta, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!

Walt Whitman
My ties and ballasts leave me - I travel - I sail - My elbows rest in the sea-gaps. I skirt the sierras. My palms cover continents - I am afoot with my vision.

Walt Whitman
Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose.

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

Walt Whitman
The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less,
it comes or it lags behind,
It comes from its embowered garden
and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world.

Walt Whitman
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Walt Whitman
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other.

Walt Whitman
To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.

Walt Whitman
The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate?

Walt Whitman
The past, the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past.

Walt Whitman
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.... And as to you corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips — I reach to the polished breasts of melons. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.

Walt Whitman
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?

Walt Whitman
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men-I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest-they suffer'd not;
The living remain'd and suffer'd-the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

Walt Whitman
A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity; but every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman.

Walt Whitman
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Walt Whitman
The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss... it is inevitable as life.

Walt Whitman
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

Walt Whitman
Now understand me well. It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

Walt Whitman
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

Walt Whitman
There is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth - but all is truth without exception; And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.

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

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

Walt Whitman
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Walt Whitman