Transcendentalism Quotes

“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, The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”
― ralph waldo emerson

“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, Self-Reliance

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Second Series

“Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“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

“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.”
― Walt Whitman

“Let the sounds of nature amplify your vibrations of peace.”
― Patrick Zeis

“The radically phenomenal thing about the truth is once you find it, you can dig and dig and you’re just going to reveal more and more. There is no end when one starts digging in the direction of the truth. It’s the ultimate life adventure.”
― Renee Chae, This Thing Called Life: Living Your Ultimate Truth

“Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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, The Conduct of Life - Ralph Waldo Emerson (With Notes)(Biography)

“They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“Every year
the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches,
in the silver baskets,
and love the world.
Is it necessary to say any more?
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If God had decided to build His own church, it would’ve been the mountains. There a man can live like He intended us to live, and never forget that He is there.”
― M.J. Hayes, Son of the Mountain

“The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also...Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct Of Life

“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

“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, The Conduct of Life

“To be sure, there were all these maddening permutations of what could be that were not to be ignored—possibilities that were still too many to consider to one’s satisfaction. Yet, there was also a stunning beauty to all of this that was so profound that one could not help but love every facet of every conceivability, whether realized or beyond reach. There was so much to capture even in stillness that was akin to grasping at grains of sand so fine as to elude the grip—it was all so intricate, so overwhelming and so rapid, and nothing ever ceased in its glorious transformation that it could be sufficiently arrested and processed and thoroughly acknowledged. But still, there was an exhilaration in being engrossed in the details that evaded capture and in being oneself ensconced in constant flux so as to surrender without recourse to what was to come.

A train whistle blows and a new door is to open: the tracks have many junction points and no shortage of stopovers and destinations. Yet, there is no instance that ever becomes the destination, no circumstance the definitive possibility, and one, for that very fact, could scarcely help but be filled with a heartening love for all of creation, if, indeed, it could be called ‘creation’ and such a word held reasonable accuracy. The Moment, after all, was Always and thus there was no ‘before,’ no instance preceding the instance. There was no infinite regression of causality, no ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ and certainly no ‘take care of yourself’ that need wrench one’s heart. There was simply the EverToward: the shifting of Now and the reformulation of Then, wherein the form and essence engendered instantaneously a sculpting of arbitrary and historic juxtapositions—which, themselves, were composed of retroactively-shaped illusions.

In spite of this, there still emerges a yearning for those prehistoric elements now faded, those characters for whom one has felt an affection and who nourished one’s growth and one’s formulations of what exists—if ‘exist’ indeed suffices as a descriptor. There is twinge of loss for what was, even if it has never been or has otherwise taken on new and ersatz constructions in mind. Notwithstanding this, one cannot help but perseverate upon the hypothetical stories of a speculative childhood that presumably nurtured imagination, the scoldings that established assumptive boundary, the conjectural sacrifices that ostensibly granted sustenance. So much of one’s respiration had been populated of this air and of this interplay of actors and elements. And yet, one’s breath cycles ceaselessly through many phases on a given day. In the morning, it is yet purging itself of that mythspell of yesterday; by afternoon, it consumes the horsefeathers of new dynamics, halted again by that which passes by too fast and which can never be frozen; as evening descends, it grows slow and pensive, sometimes coughing up senescent horsefeathers and fatigued by the persistent irregularities introduced by the day itself.”
― Ashim Shanker

“His father had encouraged his reading of Mr. Emerson, but had not, to his recollection, insisted that he read the Bible.”
― Williams John

“Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!”
― Joanna Baillie

“This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Himalayan Sonneteer Sonnet 9

I don't obey the law,
I write them.
I am the school where reformers,
And public servants learn the rudiments.

I don't follow science,
I am science.
I am the university where scientists,
Shrinks 'n philosophers develop sapience.

I believe in no God,
I am walking Godliness.
I am the cosmic record that makes,
Monks and theologians grow sentience.

I am the end of all half-knowledge,
I am the beginning of sight beyond sight.
Whoever finds me in their heart's mirror,
Can never be tamed by apish fright.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“There is a gateway in my mind,
which opens from time to time and
I'm poured with some magical words.
Some call it a gift, I call it nature -
Mind is the gateway to its own universe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“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.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula