Walt Whitman Quotes

I am exact and merciless but I love you.

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself ... the latter I translate into a new tongue.

"All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)”

-from "Song of Myself

I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;

Eravamo insieme. Tutto il resto del mondo l'ho scordato.

If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good help to you nevertheless
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.

I announce adhesiveness-I say it shall be limitless, unloosen'd;
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die,

Great is life...and real and mystical...wherever and whoever, Great is death...Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together; Sure as the stars return again after they merge on the light, death is as great as life.

I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

I HAVE said somewhere that the three Presidentiads preceding 1861 show’d how the weakness and wickedness of rulers are just as eligible here in America under republican, as in Europe under dynastic influences. But what can I say of that prompt and splendid wrestling with secession slavery, the arch-enemy personified, the instant he unmistakably show’d his face? The volcanic upheaval of the nation, after that firing on the flag at Charleston, proved for certain something which had been previously in great doubt, and at once substantially settled the question of disunion. In my judgment it will remain as the grandest and most encouraging spectacle yet vouchsafed in any age, old or new, to political progress and democracy. It was not for what came to the surface merely — though that was important — but what it indicated below, which was of eternal importance. Down in the abysms of New World humanity there had form’d and harden’d a primal hard-pan of national Union will, determin’d and in the majority, refusing to be tamper’d with or argued against, confronting all emergencies, and capable at any time of bursting all surface bonds, and breaking out like an earthquake.

I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me, You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

I do not call one greater and one smaller, that which fills it period and place is equal to any.