Quotes to inspire and reflect

Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man.

I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly, My truant lover has come, and it is dark.

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

A batter’d, wreck’d old man, Thrown on this savage shore, far from home, Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months, Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken’d and nigh to death, I take my way along the island’s edge, Venting a heavy heart.

The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud, These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips. The Wound-Dresser

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Words! book-words! what are you?

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women, If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river.

As Adam early in the morning, Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep, Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach, Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself, In you I wrap a thousand onward years.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

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. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death.

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.

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!

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.

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

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common air that bathes the globe.