“…re-examine all you have been told…”
When you're starting to question what you were handed.
This line comes on
In full
The line is one clause in a single long sentence — a list of instructions. The complete sentence:
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 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.
About this line
Whitman printed the first Leaves of Grass himself in 1855 — 795 copies, no author name on the title page, a preface running twelve pages with no title and no signature. This clause sits inside one enormous sentence of instructions: love the earth, despise riches, hate tyrants, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown. He put re-examining what you’ve been told between reading outdoors and dismissing whatever insults your soul — an ordinary daily practice, filed among the others. He dropped the preface from later editions and never restored it.
Why we carry this line
I went looking for a real Whitman line after chasing the one from the dart scene in Ted Lasso and finding nothing behind it. It’s the same instinct as Nullius in Verba — take nobody’s word for it. Re-examine everything, no matter the source.
The design
Nothing on this design sits square. On the phone case, the words step down one line at a time. On the tee, the second line starts farther in than the first.
That’s fukinsei, the Japanese design idea of asymmetry: balance without symmetry. A line about questioning what you were handed shouldn’t look like an official notice.
The dots at each end mark our cut. The line is one clause from a much longer sentence.
What happened next
One copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass reached Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote Whitman a private letter: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
Whitman had it printed in the New York Tribune. “That was very wrong, very wrong indeed,” Emerson said. If he had meant it for print, he added, he would have written it very differently.
The next summer, Emerson found his own words stamped on the spine of Whitman’s second edition.
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →