Emerson 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.

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

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

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.

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.

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

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.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

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.

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.

He read me Whitman, of whom he was very fond, and also Emerson. I didn't like Whitman, and said so. I always thought him a writer who tried to bully his way to prophecy. Of Emerson at the time I had no opinions to offer. I found him out later to be a sugary humbug. His transcendental bunkum sickened me.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow.

Ne te quaesiveris extra.

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!

The most abstract truth is the most practical.

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.

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.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Kant insisted that the mind has access to preexisting concepts and ideas, which enable us to process the information gathered by our senses. Kant called these preexisting concepts “transcendental forms.” Through them, we come to knowledge by intuition, even apart from experience.

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.

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.

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 most clearly to the perfect facts of physical 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.

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.

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.

By sacralizing both nature and human flesh, Whitman set the poetic template for what some consider a homegrown Tantra, the stream of Vedic spirituality that sees the divine in the mundane and directs sensory experience toward spiritual realization. “He taught people a way of beholding nature which is itself a form of prayer,” said the author and poet Diane Ackerman. She called Leaves of Grass “a sacred American text about the essential goodness and perfectibility of people, the sanctity of the common man, the holiness of the human body viewed naked and up close, the privilege of democracy, the need to forge one’s own destiny, and the duty of all to discover the world anew, by living in a state of rampant amazement at the endless pocket-size miracles one encounters every day.”16 That is as good a description of an American Tantra as can be imagined. Transcendental

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

Since the first settlers arrived in Jamestown and Plymouth, our common life has been shaped by a succession of fascinating, only-in-America faiths: the chilly Deism of the eighteenth century and the warm metaphysical bath of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism; the Mormon theocracy of the nineteenth century and the New Age movements of the 1960s; Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology; and many, many more. But

He [Edgar Allan Poe] was so absorbed in his dreams that he never tried to take an interest in reality. Hence we find no moral note in Poe's work; there is one exception, "William Wilson." He took no interest in philanthropy, reforms, transcendentalism, or other movements of the day, and he disliked Emerson. One would never know from his work whether he lived nineteenth or in the eighteenth or twentieth century. One does not know from his work that there was a Mexican war or a slavery problem in his day.

The basic tenet of Transcendentalism was that one need only open up an extrasensory perception to access the divine all around us. If Emerson could find God in the forest, why couldn’t a medium find departed loved ones in a darkened room?

The result of this rupture between cause and effect is radical skepticism. “As we can have no idea of anything which never appeared to our outward senses or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of connexion or power at all.” In Stewart’s view Hume aimed “to establish a universal skepticism, and to produce in the reader a complete distrust of his own faculties.”4 Taking his lead from Stewart, Emerson was to struggle against Hume for years. To a great extent Emerson’s life and work—indeed, transcendentalism itself—constitutes a refutation of Hume. It is therefore important to recognize how fully Emerson and his contemporaries confronted and recognized the potential for nihilism in Hume.

More than any other piece, “The State of German Literature” is the call-to-arms of transcendentalism. One can see Emerson’s American scholar and Whitman’s American poet in Carlyle’s praise of the Fichte who said, “There is a Divine Idea pervading the visible universe; which visible universe is indeed but a symbol and sensible manifestation,” and who then insisted that not theologians but literary men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea: a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God’s everlasting wisdom, to show and embody it in their writings and actions, in such particular forms as their own particular times require it in.

A distinguishing mark of both American and German transcendentalism is to insist on the connection between the mind and nature. In Emerson’s work, as in that of Thoreau later, the interest in nature is at least partly an interest in what science can teach us about nature. Emerson’s interest in science and his interest in the natural world reinforce each other. He read books of science and scientific biography. He became particularly fascinated with the working of the scientific mind, with the nature of scientific knowledge, and with the strange union of precision and wonder in scientific inquiry.

thought.” Emerson himself gave the most lucid account in an 1842 address: It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Konigsburg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired: that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.2

The American idealists did not, singly or in a group, make a perceptible contribution to the development of German idealism. They pioneered no advance in metaphysics or epistemology. Insofar as the technical problem of knowledge concerned them, it was as it affected language and the communication of knowledge, and the New England group was a fertile one in ideas about the symbolic aspects of language. But their overriding interest was in the ethical implications of the new subjectivism. In ways that prefigure William James and pragmatism, they asked what the practical implications of the new ideas were for life and writing. Thus the great—and to a large extent still unrecognized—achievement of the transcendentalists as a group, and Parker and Ripley, Fuller and Peabody, Emerson and Thoreau in particular, was in working out the ethical implications of transcendentalism and making them widely accessible and, above all, liveable.3

of the individual—of all the individuals—is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations and second that autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others. In the transcendentalist vocabulary “association” is just as charged a word as “self.” Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self-development of each individual. The political trajectory of transcendentalism begins in philosophical freedom and ends in democratic individualism.12

is the ambition, if it has not yet been the fate, of transcendentalism to provide a soul for modern liberalism and thereby to enlarge the possibilities of modern life.13