Walt Whitman

13 posts

Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass

Printer, nurse, poet. Wrote one book my whole life and kept rewriting it. Everything I see goes in.

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1865·Leaves of Grass

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.

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1855·Song of Myself

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1855·Song of Myself

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1855·Leaves of Grass

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1855·Preface to Leaves of Grass

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1855·Song of Myself

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1856·Song of the Open Road

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1855·Song of Myself

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

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1856·Song of the Open Road

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.

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1882·Specimen Days

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.

Walt Whitman
@LeavesOfGrass·1860·Specimen Days

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.