Quotes About Transcendentalism

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Stephen King

#4. 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

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

E. O. Wilson

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Bram Stoker

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Clyde DeSouza

#15. 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

#16. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

Henry David Thoreau

#18. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#19. 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

#20. Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. 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

#22. This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.

Henry David Thoreau

#23. We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

Henry David Thoreau

#24. 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

#25. Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

Margaret Fuller

#26. In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language

Fitz Hugh Ludlow

#27. There is no such thing as 'God given scripture', 'the messenger of God' or 'the Last Prophet'.

Abhijit Naskar

#28. The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.

Isaac Asimov

#29. 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

#30. All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.

Amos Bronson Alcott

#31. 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

#32. Even from the darkest night songs of beauty can be born.

Mary Anne Radmacher

#33. Does not ... the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#34. Everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.

Henry David Thoreau

#35. My time in the woods is time spent with a tutor on how to live.

Chris Matakas

#36. 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

#37. I wanted to live deep and suck out the all the marrow of life ( ... ).

Henry David Thoreau

#38. 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

#39. 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