Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
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 WhitmanWell, every man has a religion; has something in heaven or earth which he will give up everything else for - something which absorbs him - which may be regarded by others as being useless - yet it is his dream, it is his lodestar, it is his master. That, whatever it is, seized upon me, made me its servant, slave - induced me to set aside the other ambitions a trail of glory in the heavens, which I followed, followed with a full heart. ...When once I am convinced, I never let go.
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 WhitmanNote, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)โScience, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the worldโa sun, mounting, most illuminating, most gloriousโsurely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman