Pete

I love reading, writing, music, nature, God and feeling emotion, not necessarily in that order. To me, these things go hand in hand. My favorite writer is Henry David Thoreau. I think he was a genius and an amazing philosopher. I love all of his writing. I also like what Jim Morrison wrote with The Doors and Ian Anderson with Jethro Tull. I think there are many musicians who are great poets & writers.

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” ― Thoreau



“Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.” - Thoreau



"The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence." - Thoreau



"What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party." - Thoreau



"It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination." - Thoreau



"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it." - Thoreau



"This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work." - Thoreau



"The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." - Thoreau



“I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.” - Thoreau



"Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!" - Thoreau



"It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone." - Thoreau



"Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps." - Thoreau



“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” - Thoreau



"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return - sending back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms." - Thoreau



"What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party." - Thoreau



"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?" - Thoreau



"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..." - Thoreau



“However mean your life is, meet and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its doors as early in the spring. Cultivate property like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts… Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.” - Thoreau



"He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise." - Thoreau



“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it?” - Thoreau



"Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up." - Thoreau



"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us." - Thoreau



"Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear." - Thoreau



"One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter." - Thoreau



"The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it." - Thoreau



"You cannot hear music and noise at the same time." - Thoreau



“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.” - Thoreau



"Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent." - Thoreau



"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?" - Thoreau



"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest." - Thoreau



"The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost." - Thoreau



"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." - Thoreau



"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it." - Thoreau



"This world is but a canvas to our imagination." - Thoreau



"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it." - Thoreau



"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth." - Thoreau



"Truths and roses have thorns about them." - Thoreau



"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." - Thoreau



"There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still." - Thoreau



“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” - Thoreau



“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.” - Thoreau



"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable." - Thoreau



"The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God." - Thoreau



"As long as I have the friendship of the seasons, life will never be a burden to me." - Thoreau



"There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still."



“My temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.” - Thoreau



"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." - Thoreau



"Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights." - Thoreau





"The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." - Thoreau



"Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows." - Thoreau



"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth." - Thoreau



"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." - Thoreau



"When you knock, ask to see God — none of the servants." - Thoreau



"What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party." - Thoreau



"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark." - Thoreau



“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.” - Thoreau



“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.” - Thoreau



"If Nature is our mother, then God is our father." - Thoreau



"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us." - Thoreau



"The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son of earth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world." - Thoreau



“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” - Thoreau



Elvis has left the building.

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment." - Thoreau



"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake." - Thoreau

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” - Thoreau



“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.” ― Thoreau



"I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude." - Thoreau

"Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.” - Thoreau



Now this is what I call jammin'.

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." - Thoreau



"Things do not change; we change." - Thoreau

"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual." - Thoreau



These fingers are sheer poetry in motion ...

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." - Thoreau



“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” - Thoreau



"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." - Thoreau

"I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees." - Thoreau



“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” - Thoreau



“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.” - Thoreau



"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." - Thoreau



“What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?” - Thoreau



"Oh no, here it comes again"

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” - Thoreau



"Gather the wind
Though the wind won't help you fly at all
Your back's to the wall"

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” - Thoreau



"If you listen to fools
The Mob Rules"

“All good things are wild and free.” - Thoreau