Walt Whitman
The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.Collection: Promise
I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tellCollection: Beautiful
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.Collection: Land
All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.Collection: Beautiful
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?Collection: Soul
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.Collection: Mistake
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.Collection: Education
Resist much, obey little.Collection: Inspirational
The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.Collection: Writing
Wisdom is not finally tested by the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.Collection: Wisdom
A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.Collection: Men
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.Collection: Empathy
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?Collection: Men
Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)Collection: Gay
not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.Collection: Fall
How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!Collection: Deeds
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.Collection: Song
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard.Collection: Autumn
As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape.Collection: Fall
Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!Collection: Military
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked.Collection: Naked
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.Collection: Games
I speak the password primeval; I give the sign of democracy.Collection: Military
I lean and loaf at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass.Collection: Summer
Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, In things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best, In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest; Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place-not for another hour, but this hour.Collection: Afar
Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things.Collection: Faith
WE two boys together clinging, One the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making, Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching, Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving. No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening, Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing, Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing, Fulfilling our foray.Collection: Beach
Shut not your doors to me proud libraries.Collection: Doors
What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?Collection: Race
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.Collection: School
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.Collection: Love
Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.Collection: Art
Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.Collection: Rocks
Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass; I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.Collection: Men
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?Collection: Long
This hour I tell things in confidence/ I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.Collection: Might
Are you the new person drawn toward me?Collection: Leaves Of Grass
Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.Collection: Air
For we cannot tarry here, We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!Collection: Race
An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation.Collection: Quality
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.... [T]he wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs - out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time - chant, not of the past only, but of the future.Collection: Past
This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests meCollection: Cities
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her shall I follow.Collection: Voice
Agonies are one of my changes of garments.Collection: Agony
I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be.Collection: Accomplished