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I say no body of men are fit to make Presidents, judges and generals, unless they themselves supply the best specimens of the same and that supplying one or two such specimens illuminates the whole body for a thousand years.

Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: May 31
Died: 1892
Died: March 26
Editor
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West Hills
New York
Walter Whitman
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More quotes by Walt Whitman

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Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Walt Whitman
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I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.
Walt Whitman
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A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing lacking.
Walt Whitman
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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
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The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it comes or it lags behind, It comes from its embowered garden and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world.
Walt Whitman
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The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
Walt Whitman
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The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation: The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer, I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.
Walt Whitman
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Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)
Walt Whitman
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And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other.
Walt Whitman
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Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
Walt Whitman
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I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots.
Walt Whitman
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TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
Walt Whitman
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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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All the past we leave behind We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Walt Whitman
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I Think it is lost.....but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost . The body sluggish, aged, cold, the ember left from earlier fires shall duly flame again.
Walt Whitman
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I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law Will you give me yourself?
Walt Whitman
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People who serve you without love get even behind your back.
Walt Whitman
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The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
Walt Whitman
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An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality.
Walt Whitman
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A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
Walt Whitman