Transcendentalism Quotations

As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest.

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavour - we're more like celery as a flavour.

You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself.

The essence of a democracy is a free electorate.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,--the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

So what I did on the field was the essence of what I am. Remember me like that.

Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers.

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full.

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

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out the all the marrow of life (...).

Everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.

Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind.