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.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
Freedom – to walk free and own no superior.
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
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.
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.
Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
I will not descend among professors and capitalists.
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, or even vagueness – ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things.
Copulation is no more foul to me than death is.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments.
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding; And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.
A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking, Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I loved so well.
Now I see that there is no such thing as love unreturn’d. The pay is certain, one way or another.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death, it is form, union, plan, it is eternal life, it is happiness.
I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself?
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked.
Re-examine all you have been told in school or in church, or in any book; dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.