Top 400 Walt Whitman Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Every existence has its idiom, every thing and idiom and tongue.”

— Walt Whitman

302. “O baffled, baulked, bent to the very earth, Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that, amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my insolent poems, the real ME stands yet untouched, untold, altogether unreached, Withdrawn.”

— Walt Whitman

303. “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.”

— Walt Whitman

304. “Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!”

— Walt Whitman

305. “A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing lacking.”

— Walt Whitman

306. “Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;.”

— Walt Whitman

307. “A man can be a hero in any profession.”

— Walt Whitman

308. “Have you ever thought how much is in the negative quality of nature – the negative – the simply loafing, doing nothing, worrying about nothing, living out of doors and getting fresh air, plenty of sleep – letting everything else take care of itself?”

— Walt Whitman

309. “How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!”

— Walt Whitman

310. “What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?”

— Walt Whitman

311. “Everybody is writing, writing, writing – worst of all, writing poetry. It’d be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers – every damned one of us – were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.”

— Walt Whitman

312. “Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize.”

— Walt Whitman

313. “Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom’s athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success.”

— Walt Whitman

314. “They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.”

— Walt Whitman

315. “I refuse putting from me the best that I am.”

— Walt Whitman

316. “To me, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”

— Walt Whitman

317. “Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.”

— Walt Whitman

318. “A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning.”

— Walt Whitman

319. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

— Walt Whitman

320. “I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.”

— Walt Whitman

321. “Not I, not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.”

— Walt Whitman

322. “The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.”

— Walt Whitman

323. “I know perfectly well my own egotism.”

— Walt Whitman

324. “And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content.”

— Walt Whitman

325. “I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland – I mark the long winters and the isolation.”

— Walt Whitman

326. “Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.”

— Walt Whitman

327. “I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me.”

— Walt Whitman

328. “I meet new Walt Whitmans everyday. There are a dozen of them afloat. I don’t know which Walt Whitman I am.”

— Walt Whitman

329. “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; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons – the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

— Walt Whitman

330. “The Americans, like the English, probably make love worse than any other race.”

— Walt Whitman

331. “Under the specious pretext of effecting ‘the happiness of the whole community,’ nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government has been carried through.”

— Walt Whitman

332. “Many a good man I have seen go under.”

— Walt Whitman

333. “The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body, if not more.”

— Walt Whitman

334. “The poet is individual – he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not.”

— Walt Whitman

335. “The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of Humanity and Nature – the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects.”

— Walt Whitman

336. “In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind.”

— Walt Whitman

337. “Where the earth is, we are.”

— Walt Whitman

338. “The present now and here, America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl, Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing, To-day’s eidolons.”

— Walt Whitman

339. “Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.”

— Walt Whitman

340. “I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall, I swear to you they will understand you and justify you, The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all and is faithful to all, He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you are not an iota less than they, You shall be fully glorified in them.”

— Walt Whitman

341. “Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom.”

— Walt Whitman

342. “Caution seldom goes far enough.”

— Walt Whitman

343. “For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable.”

— Walt Whitman

344. “No specification is necessary – to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever.”

— Walt Whitman

345. “However convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here.”

— Walt Whitman

346. “Stout as a horse.”

— Walt Whitman

347. “If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.”

— Walt Whitman

348. “But a cluster containing night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead.”

— Walt Whitman

349. “My respiration and inspiration... the beating of my heart... the passing of blood and air through my lungs, the sniff of green leaves and dry leaves and of the short and dark colored sea-rocks and of hay in the barn... the delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides, the feeling of health... the full moon trill... the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.”

— Walt Whitman

350. “Freedom – to walk free and own no superior.”

— Walt Whitman