Quotes About Transcendentalism

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven

The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

He teaches how to void excrement and urine and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.

It is no dream of mine, To ornament a line; I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven Than I live to Walden even. I am its stony shore, And the breeze that passes o'er; In the hollow of my hand Are its water and its sand, And its deepest resort Lies high in my thought.

This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where.

Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

in Jeffrey S. Cramer. Walden: A fully annotated edition. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2004

We only waited to learn where the change would occur. None the less, however, it was a surprise. I suppose that nature works on such a hopeful basis that we believe against ourselves that things will be as they ought to be, not as we should know that they will be. Transcendentalism is a beacon to the angels, even if it be a will-o'-the-wisp to man.

I suppose that nature works on such a hopeful basis that we believe against ourselves that things will be as they ought to be, not as we should know that they will be. Transcendentalism is a beacon to the angels, even if it be a will-o'-the-wisp to man.

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Qabalists assert that Reason is a weapon inadequate to the Search for Reality since its nature is essentially self-contradictory. Hume and Kant both saw this; but the one became a sceptic in the widest sense of the term, and with the other, the conclusion hid itself behind a verbose transcendentalism.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

The Beats' self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world. The hippie dream that followed drew as well from a parallel lineage—Cane Ridge, the communes of the 1830s and '40s, Transcendentalism, pastoralism, Thoreau. Both were enactments of classic American fantasies.

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.

The great nineteenth-century writers — Hawthorne and Melville, Thoreau and Emerson, Twain and James — were skeptics, transcendentalists, and humanists, and not even God knows what Emily Dickinson was.

The question of purpose and meaning becomes obsolete when you think beyond human life.

I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.

It mattered little to anyone outside the Transcendental coterie that Bronson Alcott had finally written something publishable—his "Orphic Sayings"—for the opening issue; or that an unemployed schoolteacher named Henry David Thoreau had his first piece published in its pages.