"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."
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Quote collection
Walt Whitman quotes (page 21 of 25)
494 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem."
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"I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted."
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"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth. I have look'd for equals and lovers an found them ready for me in all lands, I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them"
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"Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,and dismiss whatever insults your own soul... It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women. The master knows that he is unspeakably great and that all are unspeakably great. There will soon be no more priests... They may wait awhile, perhaps a generation or two, dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place.A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man,and every man shall be his own priest."
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"To the garden of the world anew descending, Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding, The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being, Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber, The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again, amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous, My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous, Existing I peer and penetrate still, Content with the present, content with the past, By my side or back of me Eve following, Or in front, and I following her just the same."
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"Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great."
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"Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love."
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"Wisdom is not finally tested in 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, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul."
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"The Americans, like the English, probably make love worse than any other race."
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"Shut not your doors to me proud libraries."
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"Praised be the fathomless universe, for life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious."
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"What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?"
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"Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself."
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"Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations."
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"Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom."
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"And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results."
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"THIS dust was once the Man, / Gentle, plain, just and resolute—under whose cautious hand, / Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, / Was saved the Union of These States."
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"Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense - perhaps only really lastingly condense - a Nationality."
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"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."
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