"What have I to do with plows?..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.”

“But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.”

“The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.”

“There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness ... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.”

“Designers want me to dress like Spring, in billowing things. I don't feel like Spring. I feel like a warm red Autumn.”

“The individual who has experienced solitude will not easily become a victim of mass suggestion.”

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.”

“Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much.”

“I make my protein drink with whiskey. People think I'm crazy, but that's the way I am. I get stoned, I do my own thing.”