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At 2/2/02 02:04 AM, G-Hawk wrote: Well, in order for Trancendentalism to be valid, it has to mean that each and every one of us are inherently good inside....

...yeah, right.

Not necessarily good but simply that there is essential truth within oneself that one must embrace.

"I wanted...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Interested in transcendentalist philosophy? Do Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau makes sense? Then post quotes, essays, poetry and discussions here. Transcendentalism is as relevant today as it was over 150 years ago. We still face many of the same issues only in different forms.

Here are some good quotes:

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Work is victory.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is only when we forget our learning, do we begin to know.
-Henry David Thoreau

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
-Henry David Thoreau

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
-Henry David Thoreau

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
-Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
-Henry David Thoreau

Still we live meanly, like ants... Our life is fritted away by detail... Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand... simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.
-Henry David Thoreau

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We are accustomed to say that the truth makes men free. It does nothing of the kind. It is the knowledge of the truth that creates freedom. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
-Ernest H. Cherrington

People need a freedom seldom mentioned. Freedom from intrusion. We need a little privacy quite as much as we need Vitamins, exercise, praise and understanding.
-Phylis Mcginley

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
-Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator, 1890 (last words)

The proverb warns that "you should not bite the hand that feeds you." but maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding your self.
-Thomas Szasz

Politicians are the same every where. They promise to build a bridge even when there's no river.
-Nikita Khrushchev

Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
-George Bernard Shaw

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That's the essence of inhumanity.
-George Bernard Shaw

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
-Elie Wiesel.

If I had three hundred men who feared nothing but God, hated nothing but sin, and were determined to know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, I would set the world on fire.
-John Wesley