Quotes from Walt Whitman

Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.

All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

This is what you should do; love the Earth and sun and the animals...

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

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.

All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

I see great things in baseball. It's our game--the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us

Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gathered, it is the fourth of Seventh-month,

Charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything.

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

"I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass."

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

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.

Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.

O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill'd with the foolish; . . . What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,I laugh at what you call dissolution,And I know the amplitude of time.

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

He [President Abraham Lincoln] has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,To touch my person to someone else's is about as much as I can stand.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,Healthy, free, the world before me,The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.

Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death.

It [Democracy] is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.