Walt Whitman Quotes

No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance.

Have you not learn great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?

In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.

Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all.

The Past – the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf – the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?