200 Walt Whitman Quotes: Best Lines on Life, Nature & Democracy

From the open road to the quiet grass, these 200 walt whitman quotes celebrate the body and soul, democracy and comradeship, nature and death — in the poet’s own vast, musical voice. Learn more about his life and work at Wikipedia’s Walt Whitman biography.

Walt Whitman Quotes from Song of Myself

1. I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
   — Walt Whitman
2. I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
   — Walt Whitman
3. Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
   — Walt Whitman
4. You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books.
   — Walt Whitman
5. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
   — Walt Whitman
6. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing.
   — Walt Whitman
7. A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
   — Walt Whitman
8. I exist as I am, that is enough.
   — Walt Whitman
9. I know I am deathless.
   — Walt Whitman
10. I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.
    — Walt Whitman
11. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.
    — Walt Whitman
12. Your very flesh shall be a great poem.
    — Walt Whitman
13. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
    — Walt Whitman
14. And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
    — Walt Whitman
15. Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
    — Walt Whitman
16. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
    — Walt Whitman
17. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it by yourself.
    — Walt Whitman
18. It is not far, it is within reach, / Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know.
    — Walt Whitman
19. I tramp a perpetual journey.
    — Walt Whitman
20. Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams, / Now I wash the gum from your eyes.
    — Walt Whitman
21. You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
    — Walt Whitman
22. Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, / To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
    — Walt Whitman
23. I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself.
    — Walt Whitman
24. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
25. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.
    — Walt Whitman
26. The earth, that is sufficient, / I do not want the constellations any nearer.
    — Walt Whitman
27. And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.
    — Walt Whitman
28. And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, / (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)
    — Walt Whitman
29. I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots.
    — Walt Whitman
30. A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
    — Walt Whitman
31. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
    — Walt Whitman
32. Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
    — Walt Whitman
33. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
    — Walt Whitman
34. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, / It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men.
    — Walt Whitman
35. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.
    — Walt Whitman
36. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
    — Walt Whitman
37. Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
    — Walt Whitman
38. I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.
    — Walt Whitman
39. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air.
    — Walt Whitman
40. I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, / And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over.
    — Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman Quotes on the Open Road and the Journey

1. Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me.
   — Walt Whitman
2. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
   — Walt Whitman
3. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.
   — Walt Whitman
4. Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, / Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, / Strong and content I travel the open road.
   — Walt Whitman
5. Allons! the road is before us!
   — Walt Whitman
6. Camerado, I give you my hand! / I give you my love more precious than money.
   — Walt Whitman
7. I give you myself before preaching or law; / Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
   — Walt Whitman
8. Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
   — Walt Whitman
9. To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
   — Walt Whitman
10. You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, / I believe that much unseen is also here.
    — Walt Whitman
11. Listen! I will be honest with you, / I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.
    — Walt Whitman
12. The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness, / I think it pervades the air I breathe, and always pervades day and night.
    — Walt Whitman
13. You air that serves me with breath to speak! / You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
    — Walt Whitman
14. It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.
    — Walt Whitman
15. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, / Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.
    — Walt Whitman
16. I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.
    — Walt Whitman
17. The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
    — Walt Whitman
18. The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.
    — Walt Whitman
19. I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it.
    — Walt Whitman
20. I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me.
    — Walt Whitman
21. Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.
    — Walt Whitman
22. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
    — Walt Whitman
23. On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.
    — Walt Whitman
24. And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
    — Walt Whitman
25. What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
    — Walt Whitman
26. Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.
    — Walt Whitman
27. I and this mystery here we stand.
    — Walt Whitman
28. I loved the man, / I was one of a crowd, I loved the crowd.
    — Walt Whitman
29. Onward I go, from house to house, / From street to street I go.
    — Walt Whitman
30. Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! / Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
    — Walt Whitman
31. Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!
    — Walt Whitman
32. We descend upon you and all things, we arrest you all, / We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids.
    — Walt Whitman
33. We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us, / We fathom you not—we love you—we address you, and we leave you.
    — Walt Whitman
34. I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution, / I too had receiv’d identity by my body.
    — Walt Whitman
35. That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.
    — Walt Whitman
36. I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
    — Walt Whitman
37. Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this?
    — Walt Whitman
38. Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
    — Walt Whitman
39. I project myself also, I am not contain’d between my hat and boots.
    — Walt Whitman
40. I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.
    — Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman Quotes on Nature and the Grass

1. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, / And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren.
   — Walt Whitman
2. And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest, / And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven.
   — Walt Whitman
3. And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, / And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue.
   — Walt Whitman
4. 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.
   — Walt Whitman
5. 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.
   — Walt Whitman
6. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, / A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt.
   — Walt Whitman
7. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, / And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, / Growing among black folks as among white.
   — Walt Whitman
8. A noiseless patient spider, / I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, / Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, / It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.
   — Walt Whitman
9. Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
   — Walt Whitman
10. And you O my soul where you stand, / Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, / Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.
    — Walt Whitman
11. Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
    — Walt Whitman
12. When I heard the learn’d astronomer, / When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me.
    — Walt Whitman
13. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
14. This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, / Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done.
    — Walt Whitman
15. Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,) / Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles.
    — Walt Whitman
16. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
    — Walt Whitman
17. I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?) / The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies.
    — Walt Whitman
18. It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them, / It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror.
    — Walt Whitman
19. I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,) / I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears.
    — Walt Whitman
20. The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place, / The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place.
    — Walt Whitman
21. The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
    — Walt Whitman
22. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
23. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
    — Walt Whitman
24. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
25. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
26. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, / They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
    — Walt Whitman
27. I wonder where they get those tokens, / Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
    — Walt Whitman
28. Myself moving forward then and now and forever, / Gathering and showing more always and with velocity.
    — Walt Whitman
29. Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them.
    — Walt Whitman
30. Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, / Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
    — Walt Whitman
31. I hear the bravuras of birds, the bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals.
    — Walt Whitman
32. I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, / I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following.
    — Walt Whitman
33. Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night, / Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals.
    — Walt Whitman
34. The interminable inquisition of the impossible, / The endless vista of the impossible.
    — Walt Whitman
35. The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, / They scorn the best I can do to relate them.
    — Walt Whitman
36. I am enamour’d of growing out-doors, / Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods.
    — Walt Whitman
37. Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses.
    — Walt Whitman
38. I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.
    — Walt Whitman
39. What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me, / Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns.
    — Walt Whitman
40. Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me, / Not asking the sky to come down to my good will, / Scattering it freely forever.
    — Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman Quotes on Democracy and America

1. I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, / Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong.
   — Walt Whitman
2. The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, / The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work.
   — Walt Whitman
3. The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck.
   — Walt Whitman
4. The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands.
   — Walt Whitman
5. The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown.
   — Walt Whitman
6. The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing.
   — Walt Whitman
7. Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, / The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, / Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
   — Walt Whitman
8. O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, / The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won.
   — Walt Whitman
9. The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, / While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.
   — Walt Whitman
10. But O heart! heart! heart! / O the bleeding drops of red, / Where on the deck my Captain lies, / Fallen cold and dead.
    — Walt Whitman
11. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; / Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills.
    — Walt Whitman
12. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
13. O powerful western fallen star! / O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
    — Walt Whitman
14. Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, / I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, / I will make divine magnetic lands, / With the love of comrades, / With the life-long love of comrades.
    — Walt Whitman
15. I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies.
    — Walt Whitman
16. I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, / By the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades.
    — Walt Whitman
17. Come my tan-faced children, / Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, / Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes? / Pioneers! O pioneers!
    — Walt Whitman
18. 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.
    — Walt Whitman
19. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
    — Walt Whitman
20. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
    — Walt Whitman
21. The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
    — Walt Whitman
22. The great poet has less a mark’d style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution.
    — Walt Whitman
23. Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn.
    — Walt Whitman
24. I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past.
    — Walt Whitman
25. The purpose of democracy is, through the land, to let the people have the chance to become heroes.
    — Walt Whitman
26. Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name?
    — Walt Whitman
27. I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men.
    — Walt Whitman
28. Resist much, obey little.
    — Walt Whitman
29. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one.
    — Walt Whitman
30. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
    — Walt Whitman
31. The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us.
    — Walt Whitman
32. We are powerful and tremendous in our own way.
    — Walt Whitman
33. The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
    — Walt Whitman
34. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? / Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening.
    — Walt Whitman
35. Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.
    — Walt Whitman
36. Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself.
    — Walt Whitman
37. I am large, I contain multitudes.
    — Walt Whitman
38. Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
    — Walt Whitman
39. The real war will never get in the books.
    — Walt Whitman
40. Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors.
    — Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman Quotes on Death, Eternity and Short Lines

1. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, / Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle.
   — Walt Whitman
2. Out of the Ninth-month midnight, / Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot.
   — Walt Whitman
3. From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, / From the single ecstatic time and the first singing of birds.
   — Walt Whitman
4. Soothe! soothe! soothe! / Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, / And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close.
   — Walt Whitman
5. O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, / O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you.
   — Walt Whitman
6. Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, / Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me.
   — Walt Whitman
7. Never more, as I chant, the marine and ravenous odors, / Never more the white sails of schooners and sloops, the marvellous things I saw.
   — Walt Whitman
8. Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or the dreamer’s? / Will it absorb them all, and absorb the past?
   — Walt Whitman
9. Death, death, death, death, death.
   — Walt Whitman
10. Which I was and am, and which I shall be, / I was and am, and shall be.
    — Walt Whitman
11. O glad and happy death.
    — Walt Whitman
12. Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas! / Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!
    — Walt Whitman
13. O we can wait no longer, / We too take ship O soul, / Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas.
    — Walt Whitman
14. Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, / Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)
    — Walt Whitman
15. Caroling free, singing our song of God, / Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.
    — Walt Whitman
16. O soul thou pleasest me, I thee, / Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night.
    — Walt Whitman
17. Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like waters flowing, / Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite.
    — Walt Whitman
18. Whose floods the articulate utterance of Time, / With eager lips, O thou, immortal Soul, / For thee, for thee, immortal Soul.
    — Walt Whitman
19. Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only, / Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me.
    — Walt Whitman
20. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, / And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
    — Walt Whitman
21. O farther, farther sail!
    — Walt Whitman
22. O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
    — Walt Whitman
23. O farther, farther, farther sail!
    — Walt Whitman
24. Now the eaters of the earth, the eaters of the sky, the eaters of the sea, / Now the lovers of the earth, the lovers of the sky, the lovers of the sea.
    — Walt Whitman
25. I sing the body electric, / The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them.
    — Walt Whitman
26. They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, / And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
    — Walt Whitman
27. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? / And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
    — Walt Whitman
28. And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? / And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
    — Walt Whitman
29. The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred.
    — Walt Whitman
30. No matter who you are, O I love you! / No matter what you are, O I love you!
    — Walt Whitman
31. O I do not know what you are, but I know that you are divine.
    — Walt Whitman
32. I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality.
    — Walt Whitman
33. And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future.
    — Walt Whitman
34. And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results.
    — Walt Whitman
35. And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
    — Walt Whitman
36. And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, / And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
    — Walt Whitman
37. Keep your face always toward the sunshine—and shadows will fall behind you.
    — Attributed to Walt Whitman
38. Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place—not for another hour, but this hour.
    — Walt Whitman
39. I have learn’d that to be with those I like is enough.
    — Walt Whitman
40. To turn the gazing eye—you look at me, / And you do not say a single word.
    — Walt Whitman

Frequently Asked Questions about Walt Whitman Quotes

What is Walt Whitman’s most famous quote?

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” — from Song of Myself, section 51 of Leaves of Grass — is his most quoted line, celebrating the complexity of identity.

Did Walt Whitman really say ‘Keep your face always toward the sunshine’?

No verified primary source has been found for this line in Whitman’s published works, letters, or notebooks. It circulates widely under his name, so this article marks it “Attributed to Walt Whitman” rather than presenting it as genuine.

What is Leaves of Grass?

Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s life’s work — a poetry collection he self-published in 1855 and revised through nine editions until his death in 1892. It contains Song of Myself, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Song of the Open Road, O Captain! My Captain!, and most of his famous lines.

What are Walt Whitman’s main themes?

Democracy and American identity, the sacredness of the body, comradeship and love, nature’s divinity, the open road and journey, and death as a natural passage — all sung in free verse that broke every rule of 19th-century poetry.

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