My son, there is no rest for me. That which Sri Ramakrishna called "Kali" took possession of my body and soul three or four days before his passing away. That makes me work and work and never lets me keep still or look to my personal comfort.
If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what's more, you'll be a man, my son.
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.
Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick.
My great blessing is my son, but I have daughters. I have white ones and Black ones and fat ones and thin ones and pretty ones and plain. I have gay ones and straight. I have daughters. I have Asian ones, I have Jewish ones, I have Muslim ones.
America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
A new thing I've been doing is just making sure I clear off my desk and try to only touch a piece of paper once, so I get the mail, open it up, deal with it then. My son's homework, or what I get from his teachers, the same way. That way, it's not nagging me, things to add to my to-do list.
. . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that (crucifixion of Jesus Christ)!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form - the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!
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;!
Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,-
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.
I was age six or seven, and singing, "Jesus wants me for her son, beep, to shine for him," and people smiled and pinched my cheeks till the blood vessels broke, and I knew I was doing something right.