"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud."

"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher."

"Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth."

"Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people."

"To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all."

"The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual."

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences."

"Whatever satisfies the soul is truth."

"Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune."

"Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle."

"The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people."

"Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy."

"The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves."

"The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world."

"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws."

"Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed."

"And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death."

"The real war will never get in the books."

"Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?"

"All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor."

"Freedom - to walk free and own no superior."

"Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won."

"In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word."

"Simplicity is the glory of expression."

"I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep."

"I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers."

"Nothing can happen more beautiful than death."

"The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance."

"The beautiful uncut hair of graves."

"Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all."

"I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends."

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

"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."

"A great city is that which has the greatest men and women."

"Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself."

"Every moment of light and dark is a miracle."

"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything."

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."

"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains."

"Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed."

"I may be as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best."

"There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius."

"I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least."

"Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely."

"Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me."

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."

"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars."

"I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?"