38 Quotes About Transcendentalism

The transcendental movement was begun by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1820s. It was an attempt to revitalize the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially the importance of self-reliance, rationalism, and individuality. It included a rejection of old religious superstition and prescribed a practical attitude toward moral conduct. The transcendentalists believed that people could find their own answers to life's problems by studying nature Read more

They also believed that one should not be ruled by external authority or tradition if one has the ability to think for oneself.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power...
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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
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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
Let the sounds of nature amplify your vibrations of peace.
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Let the sounds of nature amplify your vibrations of peace. Patrick Zeis
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I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken. Walt Whitman
Oneness is God.
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Oneness is God. Abhijit Naskar
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Your spiritual goals can be as numerous as there are stars in the sky. And so can be your religions. But in all your vivid and diverse paths of practicing religion and spirituality, there is one very common and simple element that knows no bounds. That element is the eternal bliss that enables you to attain unimaginable feats of excellence. It is not tied to any scripture of yours, yet it is in every scripture of yours. Abhijit Naskar
Christ attained the ultimate spiritual oneness through prayer and devotion,...
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Christ attained the ultimate spiritual oneness through prayer and devotion, Moses and Mohammed through prayer, Buddha and all the Indian sages through intense meditation and so did I. And so can you. Abhijit Naskar
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There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause. And it is all because people never attempt to reach the fountain-head. They are content only to comply with the customs of their forefathers and instructions on some books, and want others to do the same. But, to explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map. . Abhijit Naskar
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Just like love becomes consummated upon the attainment of orgasm, all the faith and divinity in the world reach their ultimate existential potential upon the attainment of Absolute Unitary Qualia or simply Absolute Godliness. Abhijit Naskar
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Once you emerge from the state of absolute divinity, the self within you becomes Christ — it becomes Buddha — it becomes Moses — it becomes Krishna. The sage who emerges from the state of non-duality begins to perceive the self as Christ, not Christ as Christ — the self as Moses, not Moses as Moses — the self as Mohammed, not Mohammed as Mohammed — the self as Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna. Abhijit Naskar
Once you attain the state of Absolute Oneness or Non-Duality,...
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Once you attain the state of Absolute Oneness or Non-Duality, you become one of those spiritual legends that humanity so gloriously venerates as the founding fathers of religion. Abhijit Naskar
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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
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The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature. Isaac Asimov
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I realized the universe had consumed my whole entity with its divine sensation of eternal bliss. All I could consciously perceive in that state of mind was absolute oneness. I felt being one with the banyan tree, under which I was sitting. I felt one with the corns in the field. I felt one with the sky and the clouds in it. As if everything was me, and I was everything. I didn’t have any perception of time or space. All that there was, was an all- pervading eternity — a state of non-dualism. Abhijit Naskar
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The transcendental state of Absolute Oneness sets the human mind free. Abhijit Naskar
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Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite. Awakening into that state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean. Abhijit Naskar
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Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner.. The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As researchers of the paranormal, we must understand there are ways to change the rhythm of time within us, ways to change the beat. These ways have been known since the beginnings of civilization, and possibly much earlier. And these ways would require no more effort than simply recognizing the secret rhythms of things. Moreover, we may learn to beat with them and begin to perceive a different kind of space, and ultimately discover an altogether different conception of reality…. Ojo Blacke
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In the non-dual state, God, soul and universe are essentially one absolute system which is all-pervading, uncreated, self-luminous and eternal. Abhijit Naskar
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Awakening into the God state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean. Abhijit Naskar
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It is the ultimate religion, through which the son, the Father and all elements of the universe become unified. Abhijit Naskar
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Prayer… panacea for some, placebo to others. I thought of it as an epidural administered through the soul to anesthetize the mind. Clyde DeSouza
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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
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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
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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
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Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist. Ashim Shanker
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Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow. Margaret Fuller
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There is no such thing as 'God given scripture', 'the messenger of God' or 'the Last Prophet'. Abhijit Naskar
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Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite. Abhijit Naskar
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I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. Henry David Thoreau
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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
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All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality. Amos Bronson Alcott
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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
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The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. G.k. Chesterton
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For who can we be, but ourselves. Molly Vonk