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

What stays with you longest and deepest? Of curious panics, of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

— Walt Whitman

When I give myself.

— 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.

— Walt Whitman

When I Read the Book"When I read the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will someone when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

— Walt Whitman

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

— Walt Whitman

When the full-grown poet came, Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night), saying, He is mine;But out spake to the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;— Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, united, tightly holding hands, Which he will never release until he reconciles the two, And wholly and joyously blends them.

— Walt Whitman

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.

— Walt Whitman

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

— Walt Whitman

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

— Walt Whitman