Quotes

Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoarfrost spread; But where the ship’s huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red.

He that is down, needs fear no fall, He that is low, no pride.

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come. 1

How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry!

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.

Who would true valor see, Let him come hither; One here will constant be, Come wind, come weather. There’s no discouragement Shall make him once relent His first avow’d intent

The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.

Now o’er the one half-world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate’s offerings.

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole.

By viewing Nature, Nature’s handmaid Art, Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow.

The people know the salt of the sea and the strength of the winds lashing the corners of the earth. The people take the earth as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope. Who else speaks for the Family of Man?

Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace!

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.

A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.

Pains of love be sweeter far Than all other pleasures are.

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.

Thy drugs are quick.

Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear The very stones prate of my whereabout.

The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.

I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

Death in itself is nothing; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where.

And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.