-
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
-
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.
-
I like the scientific spirit-the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine-it always keeps the way beyond open.
-
A man can be a hero in any profession.
-
It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess.
-
I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.
-
I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.
-
Be not ashamed women, ... You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.
-
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.
-
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
-
So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out traveled road.
-
I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
-
O the joy of the strong-brawn'd fighter, towering in the arena in perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent.
-
It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy - government has no such office.
-
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people, and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools- democracy in all public and private life.
-
The road to wisdom is paved with excess. The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange.
-
People who serve you without love get even behind your back.
-
Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
-
If you done it, it ain't bragging.
-
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her shall I follow.
-
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
-
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in nature.
-
What beauty there is in words; what a lurking curious charm in the sound some words.
-
A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.