Quotes from Walt Whitman

I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, We convince by our presence.)

If you see a good deal remarkable in me I see just as much remarkable in you. Why what have you thought of yourself? Is it you then that thought yourself less?

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

This is what you should do: Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone 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 toward the people... Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, Dismiss what insults your very soul, And your flesh shall become a great poem.

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood

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.

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

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.

Ah little recks the laborer, How near his work is holding him to God, The loving Laborer through space and time

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

I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Most works are most beautiful without ornament.