Walt Whitman quotes - page 11

Me imperturbe, standing at ease in nature. (Walt Whitman)
What a devil art thou, Poverty How many desires - how many aspirations after goodness and truth - how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause. View quote
Walt Whitman
O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice O harvest of my lands O boundless summer growths O lavish, brown, parturient earth O infinite, teeming womb A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee. View quote
Walt Whitman
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, A sunlit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away. View quote
Walt Whitman
This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage, snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat. View quote
Walt Whitman
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 sundried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitchfork A song tasting of new wheat, and of freshhusk'd maize. View quote
Walt Whitman
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. View quote
Walt Whitman
Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete. View quote
Walt Whitman
In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the whitewash'd palings, Stands the lilacbush tallgrowing with heartshaped leaves of rich green, with many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicatecolor'd blossoms and heartshaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break. View quote
Walt Whitman
Press close bare-bosomed night -- press close magnetic nourishing night Night of south winds night of the large few stars Still nodding night mad naked summer night. View quote
Walt Whitman
O to be self-balanced for contingencies, To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs as the trees and the animals do. (Walt Whitman)
There's a man in the world who is never turned down, wherever he chances to stray he gets the glad hand in the populous town, or out where the farmers make hay he's greeted with pleasure on deserts of sand, and deep in the aisles of the woods wherever he goes there's a welcoming handhe's the man who delivers the goods. View quote
Walt Whitman
NOT INOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. View quote
Walt Whitman
The city sleeps and the country sleeps, the living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, the old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife and these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, and such as it is to be of these more or less I am, and of these one and all I weave the song of myself. View quote
Walt Whitman
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots. View quote
Walt Whitman
Character and personal force are the only investments worth anything. View quote
Walt Whitman
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious. View quote
Walt Whitman
The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows The past the infinite greatness of the past For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past. View quote
Walt Whitman
Camerado This is no book who touches this touches a man. View quote
Walt Whitman
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. View quote
Walt Whitman
Understand that you cannot keep out of your writing the indication of the evil or shallowness you entertain in yourself. If you possess a vile opinion of women, or if you grudge anything, or doubt immortality, these will appear by what you leave unsaid more than by what you say. There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe by which you can have in your writing that which you do not possess in yourself-that which is not in you can [not] appear in your writing. (Walt Whitman)
If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years-steadily, even if slowly, eating into them like a cancer of lungs or stomach-then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure. View quote
Walt Whitman
As to the Sanitary Commissions & the like, I am sick of them all, & would not accept any of their berths-you ought to see the way the men as they lie helpless in bed turn away their faces from the sight of these Agents, Chaplains &c. ( they seem to me always a set of foxes & wolves)-they get well paid, & are always incompetent & disagreeable. View quote
Walt Whitman
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free for ever from headache and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder, never once using medicine, drinking water only-a swimmer in the river or bay or by the seashore- neck open, shirt collar flat and broad, countenance of swarthy transparent red, -face not refined or intellectual, but calm and wholesome-a face of an unaffected animal-a face that absorbs the sunshine and meets savage or gentleman on equal terms-a face of one who eats and drinks and is a brawny lover and embracer -a person singularly beloved and welcomed, especially by young men and mechanics- there you have Walt Whitman, the begetter of a new offspring out of literature... View quote
Walt Whitman