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The sum of all known value and respect, I add up in you, whoever you are.
Walt Whitman -
Unscrew the locks from the doors ! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs !
Walt Whitman
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O joy of suffering! 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, death, face to face! To mount the scaffold! to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God!
Walt Whitman -
All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.
Walt Whitman -
Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth! Smile, for your lover comes!
Walt Whitman -
To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
Walt Whitman -
The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on; The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat, The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, The murderous buckshot and the bullets, All these I feel or am.
Walt Whitman -
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then? I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.
Walt Whitman
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You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Walt Whitman -
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
Walt Whitman -
THIS dust was once the Man, / Gentle, plain, just and resolute—under whose cautious hand, / Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, / Was saved the Union of These States.
Walt Whitman -
Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her that it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
Walt Whitman -
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
Walt Whitman -
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results, And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
Walt Whitman
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Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by regular contact with outdoor growths - animals, trees, sun warmth and free skies - or it will dwindle and pale.
Walt Whitman -
An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation.
Walt Whitman -
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun, We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.
Walt Whitman -
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.... And as to you corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips — I reach to the polished breasts of melons. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.
Walt Whitman -
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
Walt Whitman -
I hate commas in the wrong places.
Walt Whitman
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Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now, The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded,) Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.
Walt Whitman -
The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.
Walt Whitman -
And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.
Walt Whitman -
Love-buds, put before you and within you, whoever you are, Buds to be unfolded on the old terms; If you bring the warmth of the sun to them, they will open, and bring form, color, perfume, to you; If you become the aliment and the wet, they will become flowers, fruits, tall blanches and trees.
Walt Whitman