Transcendentalism Quotes

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself. ~ Lao-Tzu

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

Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment. ~ Lao-Tzu

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

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity. ~ George Boole

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

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The essence of football was blocking, tackling, and execution based on timing, rhythm and deception. ~ Knute Rockne

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. ~ G.K. Chesterton

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

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

One afternoon ... I was seized and put into jail, because ... I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama. ~ George Pierce Baker

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so. ~ Stephen Leacock

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

Ask today as you consider the many choices in your view - what is the highest and best use of your talents, skills and abilities? When you answer that, seize the opportunity to sharpen those qualities even more sharply by applying your focused effort. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

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

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

You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle. ~ Camille Paglia

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

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

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

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

Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God. ~ Peace Pilgrim

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words. ~ John Ruskin

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

Science sometimes falls short when trying to fathom the depths of our essence - and our inspiration comes from that essence. ~ Lance Secretan

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

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest. ~ Lyman Abbott

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

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle- like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of escape. He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms ~ Oscar Wilde

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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

There are always two parties;
the establishment and the movement. ~ 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

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

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

All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Allow yourself to trust joy and embrace it. You will find you dance with everything. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

So what I did on the field was the essence of what I am. Remember me like that. ~ Steve Carlton

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

One must love humanity in order to reach out into the unique essence of each individual: no one can be too low or too ugly. ~ Georg Buchner

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

The real essence of work is concentrated energy. ~ Walter Bagehot

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life ~ Henry David Thoreau

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much. ~ Bill Cosby

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

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

We should not let our response to the people who disagree with us be dictated by what they say about us or even how they treat people we care for. There has to be a chance that we can find love. ~ William J. Clinton

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof. ~ John Desmond Bernal

When it's working, what acting is really about is getting into the essence of a moment in a creative, joyous way - through whatever frees you up. ~ Lili Taylor

Children are born innocent. Before they are domesticated they live in the moment, love without fear, and don't even think about the opinions of others. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Integrity is the essence of everything successful. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Let the sounds of nature amplify your vibrations of peace. ~ Patrick Zeis

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. ~ 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

Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. ~ Gary Gygax

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

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. ~ Michael E. Porter

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

For who can we be, but ourselves. ~ Molly Vonk

In all things and in all ways, choice impacts virtually every element of our life. It bears repeating that even those things which seem out of reach of our choice are governed by how we choose to perceive them. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

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

Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavour - we're more like celery as a flavour. ~ Mike Myers