## Metadata - Author: [[Henry David Thoreau, Damion Searls, and John R. Stilgoe]] - Full Title: The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 - Category: #books ## Highlights - For our aspirations there is no expression as yet, but if we obey steadily, by another year we shall have learned the language of last year’s aspirations. ([Location 601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=601)) - When I select one here and another there, and strive to join sundered thoughts, I make but a partial heap after all. Nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and never collects them into heaps. A man does not tell us all he has thought upon truth or beauty at a sitting, but, from his last thought on the subject, wanders through a varied scenery of upland, meadow, and woodland to his next. Sometimes a single and casual thought rises naturally and inevitably with a queenly majesty and escort, like the stars in the east. Fate has surely enshrined it in this hour and circumstances for some purpose. What she has joined together, let not man put asunder. Shall I transplant the primrose by the river’s brim, to set it beside its sister on the mountain? This was the soil it grew in, this the hour it bloomed in. If sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand it, shall not we come here to pluck it? Shall we require it to grow in a conservatory for our convenience? ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=615)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author’s character is read from title-page to end. And so of the rest of our actions; it runs as straight as a ruled line through them all, no matter how many curvets about it. Our whole life is taxed for the least thing well done; it is its net result. How we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours, now in these indifferent days, with no eye to observe and no occasion to excite us, determines our authority and capacity for the time to come. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=652)) - Very few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They confer no favor; they do not speak a good word for her. Most cry better than they speak. You can get more nature out of them by pinching than by addressing them. It is naturalness, and not simply good nature, that interests. I like better the surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. Better that the primrose by the river’s brim be a yellow primrose and nothing more, than the victim of his bouquet or herbarium, to shine with the flickering dull light of his imagination. How alone must our life be lived! We dwell on the seashore, and none between us and the sea. ([Location 656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=656)) - Magnanimity, though it look expensive for a short course, is always economy in the long run. Be generous in your poverty, if you would be rich. To make up a great action there are no subordinate mean ones. If a man charges you eight hundred pay him eight hundred and fifty, and it will leave a clean edge to the sum. It will be like nature, overflowing and rounded like the bank of a river, not close and precise like a drain or ditch. ([Location 662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=662)) - The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the value of the husk. ([Location 761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=761)) - know of no rule which holds so true as that we are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. There can be no fairer recompense than this. Our suspicions exercise a demoniacal power over the subject of them. By some obscure law of influence, when we are perhaps unconsciously the subject of another’s suspicion, we feel a strong impulse, even when it is contrary to our nature, to do that which he expects but reprobates. ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WM18&location=765))