Top 400 Walt Whitman Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.”

— Walt Whitman

202. “There is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth – but all is truth without exception; And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.”

— Walt Whitman

203. “I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.”

— Walt Whitman

204. “O lands! O all so dear to me – what you are, I become part of that, whatever it is.”

— Walt Whitman

205. “The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.”

— Walt Whitman

206. “O the joy of my spirit – it is uncaged – it darts like lightning! It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time, I will have thousands of globes and all time.”

— Walt Whitman

207. “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.”

— Walt Whitman

208. “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.”

— Walt Whitman

209. “Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”

— Walt Whitman

210. “Camden was originally an accident, but I shall never be sorry I was left over in Camden. It has brought me blessed returns.”

— Walt Whitman

211. “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”

— Walt Whitman

212. “Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space.”

— Walt Whitman

213. “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.”

— Walt Whitman

214. “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.”

— Walt Whitman

215. “I hate commas in the wrong places.”

— Walt Whitman

216. “What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires – how many aspirations after goodness and truth – how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!”

— Walt Whitman

217. “I will not descend among professors and capitalists.”

— Walt Whitman

218. “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

— Walt Whitman

219. “Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs.”

— Walt Whitman

220. “The young are beautiful – but the old are more beautiful than the young.”

— Walt Whitman

221. “O the joy of my spirit – it is uncaged – it darts like lightning!”

— Walt Whitman

222. “Sun so generous it shall be you- Leaves of Grass.”

— Walt Whitman

223. “Are you the new person drawn toward me?”

— Walt Whitman

224. “We consider bibles and religions divine I do not say they are not divine. I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still. It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.”

— Walt Whitman

225. “Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.”

— Walt Whitman

226. “He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.”

— Walt Whitman

227. “Most works are most beautiful without ornament.”

— Walt Whitman

228. “I dance with the dancers.”

— Walt Whitman

229. “Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.”

— Walt Whitman

230. “What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?”

— Walt Whitman

231. “That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.”

— Walt Whitman

232. “I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked.”

— Walt Whitman

233. “Give me such shows – give me the streets of Manhattan!”

— Walt Whitman

234. “Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.”

— Walt Whitman

235. “You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe much unseen is also here.”

— Walt Whitman

236. “Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding; And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.”

— Walt Whitman

237. “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.”

— Walt Whitman

238. “O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! My South! O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!”

— Walt Whitman

239. “I will You, in all, Myself, with promise to never desert you, To which I sign my name.”

— Walt Whitman

240. “Thought Of equality- as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself- as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.”

— Walt Whitman

241. “I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, It alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder.”

— Walt Whitman

242. “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”

— Walt Whitman

243. “Wisdom is not finally tested by the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.”

— Walt Whitman

244. “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.”

— Walt Whitman

245. “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.”

— Walt Whitman

246. “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.”

— Walt Whitman

247. “The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.”

— Walt Whitman

248. “Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.”

— Walt Whitman

249. “Old age: The estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours into the Great Sea.”

— Walt Whitman

250. “We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.”

— Walt Whitman