Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that stresses the importance of personal intuition over rational thought. It began in the early 1800s as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which had caused many people to lose touch with nature.
The transcendentalists believed that humans could find true happiness by reconnecting with nature and living simply. They stressed the inherent goodness of people and nature, and advocated self-reliance, freedom, individualism and appreciation of natural beauty. Many famous transcendentalist writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, produced their work during this time period.
In this post we’ll take a look at some beautiful quotes about life, society, nature, and independence from prominent transcendentalists. Enjoy!
Transcendentalism Quotes
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.
Isaac Asimov
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.
Annie Leibovitz
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was never fish that you were after.
Henry David Thoreau
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself.
Jack London
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau
In actual life, it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.
Carl Jung
Belief fuels our decisions – even when we are not clearly aware of those beliefs.
Mary Anne Radmacher
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Allow yourself to trust joy and embrace it. You will find you dance with everything.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.
Henry David Thoreau
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every wall is a door.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
Gustave Courbet
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Henry David Thoreau
It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.
Julius Caesar
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. Forster
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
Margaret Fuller
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
You become what you think about all day long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
E. O. Wilson
That government is best which governs least.
Henry David Thoreau
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
The world belongs to the energetic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Even from the darkest night songs of beauty can be born.
Mary Anne Radmacher
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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?
E.O. Wilson
The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience.
Gary Gygax
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
James Anthony Froude
In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow
All life is an experiment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David Thoreau
People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
Søren Kierkegaard
Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.
Margaret Fuller
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims.
Morris Raphael Cohen
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau
It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.
John Desmond Bernal
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don’t follow through.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.
Mahatma Gandhi
The years in your life are less important than the life in your years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
Michael Porter
Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.
Louisa May Alcott
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
Dale Carnegie
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.
Jose Marti
Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama.
George P. Baker
As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.
Avicenna
Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.
Henry David Thoreau
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.
Amos Bronson Alcott
I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
Margaret Fuller
It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.
George Boole
Simplify your life. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don’t destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify!
Henry David Thoreau
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sorrow looks back, worry looks around, Faith looks up.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Parting Words
Transcendentalism is a philosophical and religious movement that stresses the existence of an ideal spiritual state beyond the empirical and material world. The transcendentalists believed in self-reliance, nature, simplicity, and intuition as a means to knowledge. They also championed civil disobedience as a way to change society for the better.
Transcendentalism has been influential on American culture ever since it emerged, and its ideas about spirituality, nature, and individuality continue to resonate with people today.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this collection of transcendentalism quotes about life, society, nature and independence.
What is your favorite quote from a transcendentalist writer? Leave a comment below!
P.S. You might also like these related quote collections:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
- Walter Benjamin Quotes
- Charles Baudelaire Quotes
- Virginia Woolf Quotes
- Transcendentalism Quotes
Originally Published: November 17, 2022
✍️ Cusco, Peru
