Quotes from Walt Whitman

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

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

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.

Most works are most beautiful without ornament.

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

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

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.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

This hour I tell things in confidence/ I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots.

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.

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?

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

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

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

I exist as I am, that is enough.

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.

Where the earth is, we are.

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.

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?

From this hour, freedom! Going where I like, my own master.