This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and craz… - Walt Whitman

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This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

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About Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American journalist and poet, most famous for his lifelong work on his book Leaves of Grass.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Birth Name: Walter Whitman
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Additional quotes by Walt Whitman

"We descend upon you and all things — we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside — we plant you permanently within us;
"We fathom you not — we love you — there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

No specification is necessary — to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever.

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