storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.
Walt WhitmanRe-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.
Walt WhitmanOh 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.
Walt WhitmanO me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?
Walt WhitmanNote, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)โScience, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the worldโa sun, mounting, most illuminating, most gloriousโsurely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman