Walt Whitman

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 the 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.

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.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.

There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

The real war will never get in the books.

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.

Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.

Nothing endures but personal qualities.

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.

Day by day and night by night we were together - all else has long been forgotten by me.

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

The ecstasy is so short but the forgetting is so long.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems