I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

You have not known what you are - you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return? The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk.

It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy - government has no such office.

We convince by our presence.

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.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.