"The doctors are all agreed that I..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable.”

“In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.”

“When we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard oftheir race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews. What! these proportions, these bones,--and this their work! Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady's fingers! Can this be a stalwart man's work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel?”

“Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary excitement of the sense. Accordingly, we find that imagination is active just in proportion as our sense are not excited by external objects. A long period of solitude, whether in prison or in a sick room; quiet, twilight, darkness-these are the things that promote its activity; and under their influence it comes into play of itself.”

“Spending a lot of time alone, gave me a lot of time to think. A lot of time to think gave me the time to write songs.”

“When I didn't have friends, I had books.”

“Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper's that make an ordered life impossible.”

“To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.”

“If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.”