Jim’s Reviews > The Heart of Thoreau's Journals > Status Update

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. (March 11, 1856)

I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire -- thinner than the paper on which it is printed -- then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me, not without reason, notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp, yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness.