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: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“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: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“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

“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, Divinity School Address

“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.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual Laws

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The most abstract truth is the most practical.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“I am but a drunken treasure,
with neither beginning nor end.
Don't fall prey to gatekeepers -
I am the valley, you are my gate.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“Much of my work may go over your head, that's alright - return after a few years. Barring my first ten or so straightforward works, different parts of my vast interdisciplinary oeuvre would make sense at different stages of mental development, both of the individual and the species. Therefore, if something doesn't make sense to you at the moment, don't rush - live your life, and return after some years. But mark you, still many things might not make sense even when you are old and frail - it doesn't mean you have failed me, it means you've done your bit to realize me, now it's time for the next generation to pick up where you've left off. If you figure out everything there is to know about the sun, there'll be nothing left for the future generations to explore. And remember, I am just the portal, cosmos is the writer.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“I am just the portal, cosmos is the writer.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“Miracle and Migraine (Sonnet 1370)

Words are my leisure,
Words are my life.
Words are my gift to thee,
Use 'em wisely for light.

Kind words cost us nothing,
Cruel words will cost us all.
Faith in people costs us nothing,
Systemic mistrust will end us all.

It is common knowledge in the circle,
I don't control words, I get visions.
However, every miracle takes its toll,
Hence, the migraines are getting worse.

I don't mind, so long as I am ointment.
You keep the magic, I'll keep the pain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“There is nothing supernatural about visions - or to be more accurate, contrary to traditional belief, it's not messages from some extraterrestrial domain. Visions are indeed messages from a mysterious realm alright, but like the everyday realm of human perception, the transcendental realm as well is creation of brain chemicals. I won't go into details here, as I already did that in my early days. One of my earliest works, Autobiography of God, contains a detailed analytical account of the neurobiology of transcendental experiences. However, the question is not whether there is an explanation, the question is, is it worth explaining! Because, while sometimes the lack of explanation facilitates superstition, some things are better left unexplained - such as, love.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“They ask me, why aren't you still properly known in the mainstream! Well, the Himalayas have been standing for 40 million years, yet it's only in the last century that humans first climbed Everest. They are oblivious of me, because once you get addicted to the transcendental terrains of the Himalayas, all your superficial little molehills will crumble to dust.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“To each group, of course, there must be waste—the dead fish to man, the broken pieces to gulls, the bones to some and the scales to others-but to the whole, there is no waste. The great organism, Life, takes it all and uses it all. The large picture is always clear and the smaller can be clear-the picture of eater and eaten. And the large equilibrium of the life of a given animal is postulated on the presence of abundant larvae of just such forms as itself for food. Nothing is wasted; 'no star is lost'.”
― John Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez

“We shall take something away from it [the Sea of Cortez], but we shall leave something too." And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.”
― John Steinbeck