Walt Whitman

If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Keep your face always toward the sunshine — and shadows will fall behind you.

After the dazzle of day is gone, only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; after the plain of the surface and the breakers have gone, the depths of the ocean show beautiful forms.

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling, give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard, give me a field where the unmowed grass grows, give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

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

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune — I myself am good fortune.

I exist as I am, that is enough.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.

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.