Quotes from Walt Whitman

The great poets are to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and by the justification of perfect personal candor. All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face! To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God!

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle

but 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.

Enough to live, enough to merely be.

Love is the cause of causes

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest, Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me

Death and immortality were but two aspects of the same blessed hope to this man, who poured out his life in a turgid fount of ecstatic joy in living:

Here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age—and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.

Amikor mellém érsz, idegen, és beszélni kÃ

O 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.