in Thoreau’s Journal:

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. Embrace health wherever you find her. A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree. The rosettes in the ice, as Channing calls them, now and for some time have attracted me.

It is worth the while to apply what wisdom one has to the conduct of his life, surely. I find myself oftenest wise in little things and foolish in great ones. That I may accomplish some particular petty affair well, I live my whole life coarsely. A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are three score years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe ? We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food. We consult our will and understanding and the expectation of men, not our genius. I can impose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I am but too inclined to do.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The snow blows like spray, fifteen feet high, across the fields, while the wind roars in the trees as in the rigging of a vessel. It is altogether like the ocean in a storm.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

The snow has fallen so gently that it forms an upright wall on the slenderest twig. The agreeable maze which the branches make is more obvious than ever, and every twig thus laden is as still as the hillside itself…

The sight of the pure and trackless road up Brister’s Hill, with branches and trees supporting snowy burdens bending over it on each side, would tempt us to begin life again.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In a winter day the sun is almost all in all.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Some three inches of snow fell last night & this morning concluding with a fine rain which produced a slight glaze—the first of the winter. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a record of the mellow and ripe moments that I would keep.  

I would not preserve the husk of life—but the kernel.

When the cup of life is full and flowing over—preserve some drops as a specimen-sample. When the intellect enlightens the heart & the heart warms the intellect.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A slight whitening of snow last evening—the 2nd whitening of the winter—just enough to spoil the skating now 10 days old on the ponds— Walden skimmed over in the widest part, but some acres still open—will prob. freeze entirely to-night if this weather holds….

You cannot go out so early but you will find the track of some wild creature.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

We are tempted to call these the finest days of the year.

Take Fair Haven Pond, for instance, a perfectly level plain of snow, untrodden as yet by any fisherman, surrounded by snow-clad hills, dark evergreen woods, and reddish oak leaves, so pure and still.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

My home is as much of nature as my heart embraces.  If I only warm my house, then is that only my home. But if I sympathize with the heats and colds, the sounds and silence of nature, and share the repose and equanimity that reign around me in the fields, then are they my house, as much as if the kettle sang and fagots crackled, and the clock ticked on the wall.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This plain sheet of snow which covers the ice of the pond is not such a blankness as is unwritten, but such as is unread. All colors are in white.

It is such simple diet to my senses as the grass and the sky. There is nothing fantastic in them. Their simple beauty has sufficed men from the earliest times.— they have never criticized the blue sky and the green grass.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Minott tells how he used to love to walk through swamps where great white pines grew and hear the wind sough in their tops.

He recalls this now as he crouches over his stove, but he adds that it was dangerous, for even a small dead limb broken off by the wind and falling from such a height would kill a man at once.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The winter morning is the time to see in perfection the woods and shrubs wearing their snowy and frosty dress. Even he who visits them half an hour after sunrise will have lost some of their most delicate and fleeting beauties. The trees wear their morning burden but coarsely after midday, and it no longer expresses the character of the tree…the stems and branches of the trees look black by contrast.  You wander zigzag through the aisles of the woods where stillness and twilight reign. I do not know but a pine woods is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered than from this who are nearest to being my friends.  

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last….

My acquaintances sometimes wonder why I will impoverish myself by living aloof from this or that company, but greater would be the impoverishment if I should associate with them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Beauty is where it is perceived.

When I see the sun shining on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

FAIR HAVEN 

When winter fringes every bough 

With his fantastic wreath.

And puts the seal of silence now 

Upon the leaves beneath;

When every stream in its penthouse 

Goes gurgling on its way.

And in his gallery the mouse 

Nibbleth the meadow hay;

Methinks the summer still is nigh,

And lurketh there below,

As that same meadow mouse doth lie 

Snug underneath the snow.

And if perchance the chickadee 

Lisp a faint note anon,

The snow is summer’s canopy, 

Which she herself put on.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As for the weather, all seasons are pretty much alike to one who is actively at work in the woods. I should say that there were two or three remarkably warm days, and as many cold ones in the course of the year, but the rest are all alike in respect to temperature. This is my answer to my acquaintances, who ask if I have not found it very cold being out all day….There are certain places where the ice will always be open, where, perchance, warmer springs come in.

There are such places in every character, genial and open in the coldest seasons.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Walk early through the woods to Lincoln to survey. Winter weather may be said to have begun yesterday. Why have I ever omitted early rising and a morning walk?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

My last stronghold is the forest.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character. It is the exception that we see and hear. Then I try to discover what it was in the vision that charmed and translated me. What if we could daguerreotype our thoughts and feelings! for I am surprised and enchanted often by some quality which I cannot detect. I have seen an attribute of another world and condition of things. It is a wonderful fact that I should be affected, and thus deeply and powerfully, more than by aught else in my experience — that this fruit should be borne in me, sprung from a seed finer than the spores of fungi, floated from other atmospheres! finer than the dust caught in the sails of vessels a thousand miles from land! Here the invisible seeds settle, and spring, and bear flowers and fruits of immortal beauty.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I discover a strange track in the snow, and learn that some migrating otter has made across from the river to the wood, by my yard and the smith’s shop, in the silence of the night. I cannot but smile at my own wealth when I am thus reminded that every chink and cranny of nature is full to overflowing. Such an incident as this startles me with the assurance that the primeval nature is still working, and makes tracks in the snow. It is my own fault that he must thus skulk across my premises by night. Now I yearn toward him, and heaven to me consists in a complete communion with the otter nature. He travels a more wooded path by watercourses and hedgerows, I by the highways, but though his tracks are now crosswise to mine, our courses are not divergent, but we shall meet at last.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A few petals of the witch-hazel still hold on.