Walt Whitman Quotes

We convince by our presence.

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

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

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

The real war will never get in the books.

When I give I give myself.

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

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

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

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

If you done it, it ain't bragging.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

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.

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

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.