Walt Whitman

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?”

Walt Whitman asked this in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth living after a paralytic stroke, then answered:

 “Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”