Walt Whitman Quotes

1. “Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”

2. “Be curious, not judgmental.”

3. “I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.”

4. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

5. “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”

6. “Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”

7. “I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.”

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

9. “The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”

10. “To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”

11. “Re-examine all that you have been told… dismiss that which insults your soul.”

12. “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

13. “To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”

14. “Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.”

15. “I exist as I am, that is enough.”

16. “Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.”

17. “I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game.”

18. “We convince by our presence.”

19. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?”

20. “Simplicity is the glory of expression.”

21. “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

22. “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.”

23. “When I give I give myself.”

24. “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.”

25. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”

26. “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

27. “And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

28. “The future is no more uncertain than the present.”

29. “Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.”

30. “Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.”

31. “In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.”

32. “I accept reality and dare not question it.”

33. “The beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

34. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”

35. “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

36. “The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.”

37. “To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.”

38. “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.”

39. “Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.”

40. “Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”

41. “I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

42. “Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.”

43. “Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.”

44. “There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.”

45. “Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.”

46. “The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual.”

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

48. “I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.”

49. “Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.”

50. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

51. “Produce great men, the rest follows.”

52. “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.”

53. “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?”

54. “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

55. “The real war will never get in the books.”

56. “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

57. “All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.”

58. “Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed.”

59. “I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?”

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

61. “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.”

62. “If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.”

63. “The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”

64. “The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.”

65. “And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.”

66. “Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?”

67. “Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.”

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

69. “Nothing endures but personal qualities.”

70. “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?”

71. “And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

72. “A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.”

73. “There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.”

74. “O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.”

75. “Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.”

76. “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.”