This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt WhitmanNow I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Walt WhitmanI have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
Walt WhitmanOnly themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves, As souls only understand souls.
Walt WhitmanWhy who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know nothing else but miracles, whether they be animals feeding in the fields, Or, birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These, with the rest, one and all, are to me, miracles.
Walt Whitman