Walt Whitman Quotes

This has become attributed to both Walt Whitman and Helen Keller, but has not been found in either of their published works, and variations of the quote are listed as a proverb commonly used in both the US and Canada in A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992), edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Kelsie B. Harder and Stewart A. Kingsbury.
Misattributed

While consistently attributed to Whitman, this popular motivational quote has no source. It is occasionally listed as occurring in Leaves of Grass, but the closest phrase found in that collection is "Be not curious about God."
Disputed
Variant: Be curious, not judgmental.

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Song of Myself

Source: Leaves of Grass

From the Preface to the 1855 edition of <i>Leaves of Grass</i>
Context: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . .
Context: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured.... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches.... and shall master all attachment.

Source: Leaves of Grass

Memories of President Lincoln, 14
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: Song of Myself

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass

Variant: What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life.

Leaves of Grass
Variant: I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.

Song of Myself, 52
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: Song of Myself

The Sleepers, 7
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Song of Myself

Complete Prose Works (1892), III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme, p.324 http://books.google.com/books?id=UJA1AAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA324 <br class="br">Context: If the United States haven&#x27;t grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined.<br>Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.<br>To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

&quot;Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)&quot; http://www.aol.bartleby.com/229/4011.html (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851) <br class="br">Context: It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.<br>I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

&quot;Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)&quot; http://www.aol.bartleby.com/229/4011.html (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851) <br class="br">Context: It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.<br>I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass

Conversation with Whitman (16 May 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/1/med.00001.49.html by Horace Traubel, Vol. I &lt;!-- p. 166 --&gt; <br class="br">Context: There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist, or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy — full of enthusiasms: the finest type of the man in earnest about himself and about life. I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. … Cheer! cheer! Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer — just cheer? Any religion better? — any art? Just cheer!

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass

Song of Myself, 48
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: Leaves of Grass

Drum-Taps. Give me the splendid Silent Sun
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Song of Myself

Source: Leaves of Grass

Variant: And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Song of Myself

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: Leaves of Grass