Quote

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: May 31
Died: 1892
Died: March 26
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Nurse
Poet
Writer
West Hills
New York
Walter Whitman
Shadow
Infinite
Unfathomed
Growth
Teeming
Present
Sleepers
Dark
Gulf
Past
Retrospect
Time
Shadows
Greatness

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Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems
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We convince by our presence.
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I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.
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If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.
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The habit of giving only enhances the desire to give.
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I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best! I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.
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Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
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The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.
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To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
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I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.
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The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
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Under the specious pretext of effecting 'the happiness of the whole community,' nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government has been carried through.
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Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, In things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best, In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place-not for another hour, but this hour.
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Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
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The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.
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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.
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Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.
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From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines. Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute. Listening to others, and considering well what they say. Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating. Gently but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
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O the joy of my spirit - it is uncaged - it darts like lightning!
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