Walt Whitman Quotes (181 quotes, page 3)

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)

“I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."”

Walt Whitman

Conversation with Whitman (4 July 1889) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. IV

“Now obey thy cherished secret wish,
Embrace thy friends—leave all in order;
To port and hawser's tie no more returning,
Depart upon thy endless cruise, old Sailor!”

Walt Whitman

Now Finalè to the Shore (To Tennyson)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I see great things in baseball, It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us.”

Walt Whitman

This has been widely attributed to Whitman, and no one else, but without definite source. It has sometimes been cited as being from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (sometimes with a date of 23 July 1846), where Whitman had been an editor, but its presence on that date is not apparent in the online historical archives http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle/ of that publication. <br class="br">Brian Cronin, in "Did 'Bull Durham' misquote Walt Whitman on baseball?" http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-bull-durham-baseball-20120328,0,5200453.story, Los Angeles Times (28 March 2012), suggests that this is (loosely) paraphrased from a remark of September 1888 reported in Horace L. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 2: <br class="br">I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race. We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people: the guts, vile as guts are, divine as guts are! <br class="br"> "Sports for a Dyspeptic Race", Intimate With Walt: Whitmans Conversataions With Horace Traubel, p. 261 https://books.google.com/books?id=_Rp_4VHeQkAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=With+Walt+Whitman+in+Camden&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dqMtVfHQLcODsAWM-ICIDQ&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=base-ball&f=false <br class="br">Disputed

“Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!”

Walt Whitman book Drum-Taps

Drum-Taps. Rise O Days from your fathomless Deep, 3
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”

Walt Whitman

Miracles
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell’d. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs — of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.”

Walt Whitman

"Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" (1839)

“I loafe and invite my soul.”

Walt Whitman

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