“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

— Walt Whitman, book Fulles d'herba

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

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Walt Whitman181

American poet, essayist and journalist 1819–1892

James Scott Bell

How to Make a Living As a Writer

“I am the drop that contains the ocean”

Yunus Emre (1240–1321) Turkish sufi

“I write to thee on this subject, [friend], because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything.”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

No. 66.
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

“Physics is my religious belief. In the sense that in physics we discover a fantastically wonderful world out there that’s rich in potential, rich in realization, and that has ample scope for fantasy, because the laws are so strange and there’s so much stuff out there to understand. And when you understand it, you understand how that could be.
I learn that I myself am very small. But I am also very large because I contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. I can process information. I can understand things. I can imagine. I can have fun. That’s the essence of my religion. I learn my religion from the study of what the world is and how it works.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

as quoted by Claudia Dreyfus in: [January 21, 2021, A Prodigy Who Cracked Open the Cosmos (an interview with Franck Wilczek), Quanta Magazine, https://www.quantamagazine.org/frank-wilczek-cracked-open-the-cosmos-20210112/]

“I am so happy, I cannot be contained in the world;
But like a spirit, I am hidden from the eyes of the world.
If the foot of the trees were not tied to earth, they would be pursuing me;
For I have blossomed so much, I am the envy of the gardens.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Divan 1740:1-3, as translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz in Reading Mystical Lyric : The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1998)

“I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

“And you are here beside me, small,
Contained and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall —
Yet going whither you are bent.
I am the past, and that is all.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

"At the San Francisco Airport" (1954)
The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1960)

“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty…”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

“Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal, Volume 3

“As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to William Short (31 October 1819)
1810s
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

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