American Transcendentalism
“ It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, always do what you are afraid to do.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalism
“In the faces of men and women, I see God”
-Walt Whitman
dogma of established religion.
Transcendentalism: The tenets:
The first transcendentalists
“Self-reliance” -Emerson
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation in suicide…”
“Trust thyself…”
“What I must do is
all that concerns me,
not what people think…”
“…to be great is to be misunderstood”
“Nature”
for two years studying
nature and seeking
truth within himself
“I went into 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 has to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
“Still we live meanly like ants.”�“Our life is frittered away by detail.”�“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”�“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand.”�
Individuality
“How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
“Civil Disobedience”
“[If injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be the friction to stop the machine.”