in Thoreau’s Journal:

In winter I can explore the swamps and ponds. 

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:

Nature and human life are as various to our several experiences as our constitutions are various— Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?  Could a greater miracle take place than if we should look through each other’s eyes for an instant.  What I have read of Rhapodists—of the primitive poets—Argonautic expeditions—the life of demigods & heroes—Eleusinian mysteries—&c—suggests nothing so ineffably grand and informing as this would be.  

We know not what it is to live in the open air—our lives are domestic in more senses than we had thought. From the hearth to the field is a great distance.  A man should always speak as if there were no obstruction not even a mote or a shadow between him & the celestial bodies. The voices of men sound hoarse and cavernous—tinkling as from out of the recesses of caves—enough to frighten bats & toads—not like bells—not like the music of birds, not a natural melody.

Of all the Inhabitants of Concord I know not one that dwells in nature.—  If one were to inhabit her forever he would never meet a man. This country is not settled nor discovered yet.

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.  

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How indispensable to a correct study of Nature is a perception of her true meaning.

The fact will one day flower out into a truth. The season will mature and fructify what the understanding had cultivated. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I still recall that characteristic winter evening of December 9th. The cold, dry, and wholesome diet my mind and senses necessarily fed on,  —oak leaves, bleached and withered weeds that rose above the snow, the now dark green of the pines, and perchance the faint metallic chip of a single tree sparrow; the hushed stillness of the wood at sundown, aye, all the winter day, the short boreal twilight, the smooth serenity and reflections of the pond, still alone free from ice; the melodious hooting of the owl, heard at the same time with the yet more distant whistle of a locomotive, more aboriginal, and perchance more enduring here than that, heard above all the voices of Concord, as if they were not, the last strokes of the woodchopper (how little he is Anglicized!) who presently bends his steps homeward; the gilded bar of cloud across the apparent outlet of the pond, conducting my thoughts into the eternal west, the deepening horizon glow, and the hasty walk homeward to enjoy the long winter evening. 

The hooting of the owl; that is a sound which my red predecessors heard here more than a thousand years ago it rings far and wide, occupying the space rightfully, — grand, primeval, aboriginal sound. There is no whisper in it of the Bulkeleys, the Flints, the Hosmers, who recently squatted here, nor of the first parish, nor of Concord Fight, nor of the last town-meeting.

in Thoreau’s Journal

Man lays down his body in the field and thinks from it as a stepping stone to vault at once into heaven, as if he could establish a better claim there when he had left such a witness behind him on the plain.

Our true epitaphs are those which the sun and wind write upon the atmosphere around our graves so conclusively that the traveller does not draw near to read the lie on our tombstones. Shall we not be judged rather by what we leave behind us, than what we bring into the world? The guest is known by his leavings. When we have become intolerable to ourselves shall we be tolerable to heaven?

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:

How much warmer our woodlands look and are for these withered leaves that still hang on! Without them the woods would be dreary, bleak, and wintry indeed. Here is a manifest provision for the necessities of man and the brutes. The leaves remain to keep us warm and to keep the earth warm about their roots. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Another still more glorious day, if possible. Indian summer, even. These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness.

Paddled up Assabet.  Passed in some places between shooting ice crystals extending from both sides of the stream.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A still, completely gray, overcast, chilly morning. At 8:30 a fine snow begins to fall, increasing very gradually, perfectly straight down, till in fifteen minutes the ground is white, the smooth places first, and thus the winter landscape is ushered in.

And now it is falling thus all the land over, sifting down through the tree-tops in woods, and on the meadow and pastures, where the dry grass and weeds conceal it at first, and on the river and ponds, in which it is dissolved. But in a few minutes it turns to rain, and so the wintry landscape is postponed for the present.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Winter has come unnoticed by me, I have been so busy writing. This is the life most lead in respect to Nature. How different from my habitual one! It is hasty, coarse, and trivial, as if you were a spindle in a factory. The other is leisurely, fine, and glorious, like a flower. In the first case you are merely getting your living; in the second you live as you go along. You travel only on roads of the proper grade without jar or running off the track, and sweep round the hills by beautiful curves.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In November & now before the snow I am attracted by the numerous small evergreens on the forest floor—now most conspicuous.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How every one of these leaves that are blown about the snow-crust or lie neglected beneath, soon to turn to mould! Not merely a matted mass of fibres like a sheet of paper, but a perfect organism and system in itself, so that no mortal has ever yet discerned or explored its beauty.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The sun goes down behind a low cloud & the world is darkened—the partridge is budding on the apple tree—& burst away from the pathside. Fair Haven pond is skimmed completely over— The ground has been frozen more or less—about a week—not very hard…. Before I got home the whole atmosphere was suddenly filled with a mellow yellowish light equally diffused—so that it seemed much lighter around me than immediately after the sun sank behind the horizon cloud 15 minutes before. — Apparently not till the sun had sunk thus far did I stand in the angle of reflection.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I love the few homely colors of nature at this season, her strong, wholesome browns, her sober and primeval grays, her celestial  blue, her vivacious green, her pure cold snowy white.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

But even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer —& a serene inner life—not destitute of warmth & melody—Only the cold evergreens wear the aspect of summer now and shelter the winter birds.