Quotes about Emerson

evergreen philosophy of Idealism, springing up on American soil.

The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

The soul is what knows—and draws us towards—truth, beauty, and goodness. Moreover, for Emerson, each person's soul is only a part of the great, universal "over-soul." He describes the soul as a vast ocean, with our individual souls being tiny inlets into the shore. Individuality is an illusion—really, we're all connected, like fingers extending from one hand.

spent much of the next two years cowriting and editing her biography.  Emerson was a signatory of the "Declaration of Sentiments" of the first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. And in 1855, he attended and addressed the convention in Boston.

Religion is the perception of that power which constructs the greatness of the centuries out of the paltriness of the hours.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.

The antidote to this abuse of formal government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy. 'The foundations

This outlook, one that said that American history must be the history of nature speaking through men, not of men shaping nature, became the single most powerful force in American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and shaped some of America's greatest works of literature, such as Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass and Walden, as well as generating an American school of philosophy , to be furthered by William James and John Dewey.

was a melancholy introvert who declined to join in philosophical discussions.)   The Concord circle of sympathetically-minded thinkers, writers, and social activists became known as Transcendentalists. What exactly is Transcendentalism? That's the question Emerson set out to answer at Boston's Masonic Temple in 1842. In addition to defining his own philosophy, this lecture planted the seeds of the modern self-help and personal development movements.