Quotes on Transcendentalism

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

We should not let our response to the people who disagree with us be dictated by what they say about us or even how they treat people we care for. There has to be a chance that we can find love.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

The essence of football was blocking, tackling, and execution based on timing, rhythm and deception.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full quotation and the story.

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

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