Quotes & Sayings About Transcendentalism

Awakening into the God state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean. — Abhijit Naskar

Everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. — Henry David Thoreau

All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality. — Amos Bronson Alcott

Prayer ... panacea for some, placebo to others. I thought of it as an epidural administered through the soul to anesthetize the mind. — Clyde DeSouza

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice. — Quentin Crisp

The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature. — Isaac Asimov

That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

My time in the woods is time spent with a tutor on how to live. — Chris Matakas

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wellspring for the passion that drove public speech and action in behalf of the environment was in large part religious and ethical. Environmentalism, in short, had become one version of nature religion in the lingering shadow of American transcendentalism. — Catherine L. Albanese

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here was enough transcendentalism to drive even a cave-dwelling Tibetan holy man insane. Jack Sawyer was everywhere; Jack Sawyer was everything. — Stephen King

The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry. — Louis Dudek

In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language — Fitz Hugh Ludlow

There is no such thing as 'God given scripture', 'the messenger of God' or 'the Last Prophet'. — Abhijit Naskar

The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things. — Robert D. Richardson

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. — Henry David Thoreau

Science does not know its debt to imagination. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even from the darkest night songs of beauty can be born. — Mary Anne Radmacher

Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow. — Margaret Fuller

This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space. — Henry David Thoreau

Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government. — Howard Zinn

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wanted to live deep and suck out the all the marrow of life ( ... ). — Henry David Thoreau

In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you. — Jon Krakauer

The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry. — Henry David Thoreau

Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle. — Henry David Thoreau

Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist. — Ashim Shanker

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. — Henry David Thoreau

Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. — E. O. Wilson

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic. — Gunnar Myrdal

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism - religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality. — H.P. Lovecraft

Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,
these are some of our astronomers. — Henry David Thoreau

The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,
the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims. — Herman Melville

A walk in the woods can reveal many things, and it is a good time to practice transcendentalism. Look at a tree and realize it's not just a tree, its roots may go into the ground but it may also go into other worlds, other eternities. — Frederick Lenz

Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite. — Abhijit Naskar

Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Two attempts have been made in the world to found social life: the one was upon religion, and the other was upon social necessity. The one was founded upon spirituality, the other upon materialism; the one upon transcendentalism, the other upon realism. — Swami Vivekananda

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock. — Fred Tomaselli

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner...The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists. — Mary Oliver

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? — Henry David Thoreau

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Does not ... the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Transcendentalism is a beacon to the angels, even if it be a will-o'-the-wisp to man. — Bram Stoker

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson