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Transcendentalist Works. Important Quotes Explained. f rom Nature (Emerson). “In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.”
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Transcendentalist Works Important Quotes Explained
from Nature (Emerson) “In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.” “Standing on the bare ground, -my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
from Nature (Emerson) “In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages.” “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”
from Self-Reliance (Emerson) “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him bu through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till…”
from Self-Reliance (Emerson) “Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”
from Self-Reliance (Emerson) “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.”
from Walden (Thoreau) “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.” “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
from Walden (Thoreau) “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen.” “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, -we never need read of another. One is enough…” www.goodnewsnetwork.org
from Walden (Thoreau) “Men frequently say to me, ‘I should think you would fee lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such,-Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way? What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another…”
from Walden (Thoreau) “How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!” “If you have built castled in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) “The government is best which governs least…or not at all.” “Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?” “The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.” “Unjust laws exist…Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) “I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, til one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”
