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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“You still hang from the trees, yet you claim to understand the Himalayas!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“When Naskar Runs Out (Origin Myth Sonnet, 2705)

Mission Naskar originated from the mind
of an ordinary mortal, named Gadadhar Chatterjee -
he was a crazy, illiterate, eccentric hindu priest,
who used to have hallucinations of his venerated
Mother Kali, not unlike how my own bond
with him ignited during my adolescence -

but that's not why I call him crazy,
he was crazy because despite being a hindu priest,
he used to sit for namaaz in the mosque next to his
fellow muslim, just like he used to call Christ his own,
all of which was blasphemy for a man in his position.

And from time to time when treachery of the world
drags me down to my lowest, so much so that
everyday mortal means feels powerless to lift me up,
I throw myself back at his feet,

like a ship battered from the voyage
anchored at its home-dock for repairs -
lo and behold, I emerge Naskar again,
with vision restored, and veins emboldened.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“I am, for I am not.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“I am, for I am not (Sonnet 2539)

I don't care what I am,
I don't know what I am,
I am, for I am not -
I am empty, I contain eternity.

I am not a man of faith,
I am the faith of humankind.
I am not ahead of time,
I just tick outside the clock.

I learnt nothing the traditional way,
neither sciences, nor languages,
all I did was dissolve myself,
and oceans overflowed to saturate my senses.

Yo soy, porque no soy,
I am, for I am not -
alive outside jungle books,
cattle I am not.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“To be is not to be.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“Only Fact is Me (Sonnet 2655)

I'm the impulse before the language,
I'm the reason before the science,
I'm the pulse before the poetry,
I'm the kernel before the divinity.

I'm larger than genre, larger than grammar,
I'm larger than primate dictionary.
I'm the duty that precedes the path,
I'm the mutation before the humanity.

I switch languages like radio,
I switch cultures like seasons -
if you tie Naskar to a nation,
you've failed the Naskar mission.

Only fact in this universe - is me -
and I am nothing, so nothing is fact,
everything is flux -
and I - am the flux of infinity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“Only fact in this universe - is me - and I am nothing, so nothing is fact, everything is flux - and I - am the flux of infinity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“I'm the center that the dervish whirls around, I'm the flame that syllables dance around - You think Naskar writes me, Naskar is an idiot, I'm beyond Naskar, beyond every single puny mortal brain, I'm the original sentience that occasionally seeks out fitting vessels, with a dominant tendency of expansion and a tinge of naivety, and makes them whirl at my whim, so that your little toddler species doesn't crawl back into jungle slime.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“Every potential transcendental idea still needs rational thought afterwards to be executed in the mortal world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“I am for I think not.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“Neuroscientist who can't tell
neuroscience from philosophy
(Sonnet 2696)

They say, I don't understand the difference
between neuroscience and philosophy,
but has it ever occurred to you that,
you might be too primitive to fathom
a mental state where neuroscience, philosophy,
theology, and poetry, it's all one;

just like you are too primitive
to find divinity outside fantasy,
or reason outside your philosophy,
or literature outside your grammar,
or justice outside your ideology -

just like you are too primitive to find
humanity outside your nationality!”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock