Walt Whitman Quotes

Like all pioneers I have labored more in faith and hope.

The pioneers get all the arrows.

Can we somehow muster the courage and steadfastness of purpose that characterized the pioneers of a former generation? Can you and I, in actual fact, be pioneers [today]?

We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.

Part of the western movement is this desire that we, Americans, have to keep pressing on.

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

There will always be a frontier where there is an open mind and a willing hand.

My countrymen: we have reached a turning point in our history. The choice is yours. Shall we venture into this brave new world, bright with possibilities, or retreat to the safety of our familiar but sterile past? I am for crossing the frontier.

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

Withough danger you cannot go beyond danger.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.

We (The British) have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

So long as your desire to explore is greater than your desire to not screw up, you're on the right track.

All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!

There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

The footsteps of a pioneer become ultimately the highway of a nation.

The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.

Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.

Humanity is always looking for the next great world, the next frontier. I wonder how different this world would be if we were content with where we were.