in Thoreau’s Journal:

Another fine morning. Willows and alders along water courses all alive these mornings, and ringing with the trills and jingles and warbles of birds, even as the waters have lately broken loose and tinkle below, ––song-sparrows, blackbirds, not to mention robins, etc., etc.  The song-sparrows are very abundant, peopling each bush, willow, or alder for a quarter of a mile, and pursuing each other as if selecting their mates. It is their song which especially fills the air, made an incessant and indistinguishable trill and jingle by their numbers. I see ducks afar sailing on the meadow…The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the hill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Nature is constantly original and inventing new patterns, like a mechanic in his shop. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

If I know what I love, it is because I remember it.  

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The sad memory of departed friends is soon incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss.  Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi the most unsightly objects become radiant with beauty.

There seem to be two sides of this world presented to us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death….If we see Nature as pausing, immediately all modifies and decays; but seen as progressing she is beautiful.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

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

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfaction and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena,

so that what my senses hourly perceive in my daily walk, the conversations of my neighbors, may inspire me and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Rivers, too, like the walker, unbutton their icy coats, and we see the dark bosoms of their channels in the midst of the ice. Again, in pools of melted snow, or where the river has risen, I look into clear, placid water, and see the russet grassy bottom in the sun….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

You incline to walk now along the south side of hills which will shelter you from the blustering northwest and north winds. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring.

How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I did not mention the drifts yesterday. Most of the snow left on bare, dry level ground consists of the remains of drifts, particularly along fences,— most on the south side. Also much that looks like snow is softened ice in the lower parts of fields.

Looking from Annursnack, there is no perceptible difference as to snow between the north and south prospects, though the north one is not extensive; but the snowiest view is westward. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The river is frozen more solidly than during the past winter, and for the first time for a year I could cross it in most places. 

I did not once cross it the past winter, though by choosing a safe place I might have done so without doubt once or twice. But I have had no river walks before.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science requests me, as he probably has thousands of others, by a printed circular letter from  Washington the other day, to fill the blank against certain questions, among which the most important one was what branch of science I was specially interested in, using the term science in the most comprehensive sense possible. Now, though I could state to a select few that department of human inquiry which engages me, and should be rejoiced at an opportunity to do so, I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing-stock of the scientific community to describe or attempt to describe to them that branch of science which specially interests me, inasmuch as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law. So I was obliged to speak to their condition and describe to them that poor part of me which alone they can understand.

The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. Now I think of it, I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not  understand my explanations.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Man is not the final judge of the humblest work—though it be piling wood.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The slight robin snow of yesterday is already mostly dissipated, but where a heap still lingers the sun on the warm face of this cliff leads down a puny, trickling rill, moistening the gutters on the steep face of the rocks…You can trace the course of this trickling stream over the rock through such a patch of lichens by the olive green of the lichens alone. Here and there the same moisture refreshes and brightens up the scarlet crown of some little cockscomb lichen,

and when the rill reaches the perpendicular face of the cliff, its constant drip at night builds great organ pipes, of a ringed structure, which run together buttressing the rock. Skating yesterday and to-day.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Has snowed three or four inches —very damp snow — in the night; stops about 9 a. m.

This will probably help carry off the old snow, so solid and deep.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I have thoughts, as I walk, on some subject that is running in my head, but all their pertinence seems gone before I can get home to set them down.

The most valuable thoughts which I entertain are anything but what I thought. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To-day it snows again, covering the ground.

To get the value of the storm, we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin, and we be, as it were, turned inside out to it, and there be no part in us but is wet or weather-beaten, so that we become storm men instead of fair-weather men.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The abundance of light, as reflected from clouds and the snow, etc., etc., is more springlike than anything else of late.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In composition I miss the hue of the mind.

As if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning and evening—without their colors—or the heavens without their azure.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. 

Thus you may feel your pulse.