I like the scientific spirit-the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine-it always keeps the way beyond open.
Walt WhitmanA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
Walt WhitmanTo speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.
Walt WhitmanSweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is.
Walt Whitman