Walt Whitman Quotes

What doesn’t kill you leaves scars, ruins your lungs, dries out all your tears, leaves you lying awake at 4 in the morning
wishing you weren’t alive.

I dote on myself...there is that lot
of me, and all so luscious.
Each moment and whatever happens
thrills me with joy.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

"I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you."

-from "To You"

You have not known what you are — you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life;
Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time;
What you have done returns already in mockeries;
Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?
The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;

The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to your nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;

The new rule shall rule as the soul rules, and as the love and justice and equality that are in the soul rule.

The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with wonder and love — to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior realms — so, out of the series of the preceding social and political universes, now arise these States. We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.