Walt Whitman

Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

Produce great men, the rest follows.

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.

In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

I exist as I am, that is enough.

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

When I give I give myself.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed.

There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.