"Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generation of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieve… - Walt Whitman

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

[From the preface to Leaves Grass]

Remember, fear not, be candid, promulge the body and the soul, Dwell a while and pass on, be copious, temperate, chaste, magnetic, And what you effuse may then return as the seasons return, And may be just as much as the seasons.

I should like to know, what is life?
Yes indeed — what is life? There’s something in the human critter which only needs to be nudged to reveal itself: something inestimably eloquent, precious: not always observed: it is a folded leaf: not absent because we fail to see it: the right man comes — the right hour; the leaf is lifted. The largest part of our human tragedies are humanly avoidable: they come from greed, from carelessness, from causes not catastrophic, elemental: with more radical good heart most of our woes would disappear.