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?

Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom, And the great star early droop in the western sky in the night, I mourn, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

Camarado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man.

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions, But really I am neither for nor against institutions.

He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original practical example.

What can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemmed Manhattan?

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.

How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.

I think I could turn, and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain.