Quotes on Transcendentalism

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.

Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

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.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

There are always two parties;_x000D_ the establishment and the movement.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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.