Leaves Of Grass By Walt Whitman Quotes & Sayings

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself. — Karel Appel

O amazement of things-even the least particle! — Walt Whitman

And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth. — Walt Whitman

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake. — Walt Whitman

You try to get yourself into a situation where you only have to answer to yourself, where you can ask advice of people and work with your peers and mentors and things to try to do the best job that you can possibly do. — George Lucas

Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country. — Wynton Marsalis

To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one's self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one's self
And perfectly joined in permanent commitment
To another--and to one's inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon's own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child's scars
Or an adult's deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are--and always secretly were,
In the very core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide. — James Kavanaugh

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder,
mullein and poke-weed. — Walt Whitman

Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge. — Carl Jung

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. — Walt Whitman

I know I am deathless...We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. — Walt Whitman

Sun so generous it shall be you- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power. — Neal Stephenson

Something there is more immortal even than the stars. — Walt Whitman

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, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
[From the preface to Leaves Grass] — Walt Whitman

I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The new rule shall rule as the soul rules, and as the love and justice and equality that are in the soul rule. — Walt Whitman

I situate myself, and seat myself,
And where you recline I shall recline,
For every armchair belonging to you as good as belongs to me.
I loaf and curl up my tail
I yawn and loaf at my ease after rolling in the catnip patch.
(From Meow of Myself, from LEAVES OF CATNIP) — Henry N. Beard

One world is aware, and by 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, Leaves of Grass — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Water jokes about the obstacles on its way; wise man jokes about the obstacles on his way! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers
and dreams and gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of the usual mistake. — Walt Whitman

By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge. — William S. Burroughs

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love. — Walt Whitman

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; — Walt Whitman

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. — Walt Whitman

Your tittle-tattlers, and those who listen to slander, by my good will should all be hanged
the former by their tongues, the latter by the ears. — Plautus

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass — Virginia Woolf