I exist as I am that is enough If no other in the world be aware I sit content And if each and all be aware I sit content.
I think I could turn and live with animals they are so placid and self-contain'd I stand and look at them long and long They do not sweat and whine about their condition They do not lie awake in t...
To me, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
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.
Song of MyselfI have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, No...
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.
Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in i...
I am large, I contain multitudes
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, None but has found you imperfec...
O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
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.
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,...
The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.I depart as air, I shake my white locks at th...
I refuse putting from me the best that I am.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,I tread day and night such roads.