Junio 23, 2003
This is what you shall do...
This is what you shall 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, 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...
Walt Whitman
Posted by sarita at 2:45 PM
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling
Posted by sarita at 9:42 AM