Quotes About Transcendentalism

Whatever the practical value of the Walden experiment may be, there is no question that the book is one of the most vital and pithy ever written.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight

Transcendentalists believe that our minds are always open to a new inflowing of light and power from the Source. This is called inspiration.

Transcendentalists have been accused of being rebels and rule-breakers. But if they disregard society's customs and laws, it's because they're listening to conscience and obeying the Law Maker within. There are situations where virtue asks us to break the rules.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

was a melancholy introvert who declined to join in philosophical discussions.)   The Concord circle of sympathetically-minded thinkers, writers, and social activists became known as Transcendentalists. What exactly is Transcendentalism? That's the question Emerson set out to answer at Boston's Masonic Temple in 1842. In addition to defining his own philosophy, this lecture planted the seeds of the modern self-help and personal development movements.

Nature is too thin a screen the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.

Spirit and soul is horseshit of the worst sort. Obviously there are no fairies, no Santa Clauses, no spirits. What there is, is human goals and purposes as noted by sane existentialists. But a lot of transcendentalists are utter screwballs.

Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards…

For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.

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.

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

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would definitely be my homeboy.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

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.

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.

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.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

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

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

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