Walt Whitman Poetry Quotes

#1. The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

Walt Whitman

#2. The best way to understand the soul of America is read Walt Whitman's poetry

Dermot McCabe

#3. I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

Mae Whitman

#4. The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.

Walt Whitman

#5. For we cannot tarry here,
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!

Walt Whitman

#6. The ultimate censorship is the flick of the dial.

Tommy Smothers

#7. Sometimes when I've got a baseball player alone, I'll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him. And the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. Course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks its foreplay.

Ron Shelton

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

Walt Whitman

#9. INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.

Ambrose Bierce

#10. WHAT am I, after all, but a child, pleas'd with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over;
I stand apart to hear - it never tires me.
To you, your name also;
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?

Walt Whitman

#11. Resist much, obey little.

Walt Whitman

#12. When actors encounter a mishap during a stage performance,
they transform it for good purpose by employing a technique called,
"use the difficulty." How can you "use the difficulty" in your life?

Gina Greenlee

#13. It was a masterpiece. Nobody bought it. (re: Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, 1844)

Anthony Bailey

#14. The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

Robert Littell

#15. What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

Walt Whitman

#16. Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.

Alonzo Church

#17. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

Matt Haig

#18. Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

Beaumont Newhall

#19. The best way to fight terrorism is not through guns. It's through pens, books, teachers and schools.

Malala Yousafzai

#20. I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth ... in mine it begins to be loosened.

Walt Whitman

#21. Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry,

Walt Whitman

#22. Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

Walt Whitman

#23. Peace is always beautiful.

Walt Whitman

#24. Forgiveness was like charity: You could dispense it, or not. And, as with charity, the one dispensing held the power.

Joe Okonkwo

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

Walt Whitman

#26. There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Anna Quindlen

#27. 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.

Walt Whitman

#28. This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me

Walt Whitman

#29. O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

Walt Whitman

#30. At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

Walt Whitman

#31. Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems

Walt Whitman

#32. This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

Walt Whitman

#33. I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

Walt Whitman

#34. If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.

Walt Whitman

#35. And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.

Walt Whitman

#36. Cat tongues are awesome.
Nellie Gomez, The 39 Clues, Beyond The Grave

Jude Watson