Comments on baseball in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (23 July 1846), as quoted in Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (1950) by Florence Bernstein Freedman, p. 126-127 http://books.google.com/books?id=M34nK8SaiMcC&dq=Walt+Whitman+schools&lr=&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

“Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.”

Walt Whitman

Roaming in Thought, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.”

Walt Whitman

"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," http://www.bartleby.com/229/5004.html letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

“I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen.
O Mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boatloads of poor, bloody, and pale and wounded young men again — for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle, and the scenes on the field, too, and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils and butchers butchering each other.”

Walt Whitman

Letter to his mother (22 March 1864)

“Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination!
Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination?”

Walt Whitman

Youth, Day, Old Age and Night
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.”

Walt Whitman book Drum-Taps

Drum-Taps. Reconciliation
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited;
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.”

Walt Whitman

Night on the Prairies
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.”

Walt Whitman

Song of the Universal, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was: maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings.”

Walt Whitman

Conversation with Whitman (July 16 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/2/med.00002.2.html by Horace Traubel, Vol. II

“The paths to the house I seek to make,
But leave to those to come the house itself.”

Walt Whitman

Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Walt Whitman

Memories of President Lincoln, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)