Winter...

"What you call bareness and poverty is to me simplicity.

God could not be unkind to me if he should try.

I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.

I love to have the river closed up for a season and a pause put to my boating, to be obliged to get my boat in.

I shall launch it again in the spring with so much more pleasure.

This is an advantage in point of abstinence and moderation compared with the seaside boating, where the boat ever lies on the shore.

I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

I find it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am.

What you consider my disadvantage, I consider my advantage.

While you are pleased to get knowledge and culture in many ways, I am delighted to think that I am getting rid of them."


- Henry David Thoreau