Transcendentalism+in+Texts+Comparison+Chart

Transcendentalism in Texts-- Comparison Chart

Quotes from Texts that demonstrate Transcendental Concepts

You may put MULTIPLE quotes within the boxes, just use bullets to separate them.


 * || Individualism || Reverence of Nature || Nonconformity || Self-Reliance || Simplicity || Carpe Diem || Oversoul || Intuition ||
 * "A Psalm of Life" || * "Be not like dumb, driven cattle/Be a hero in the strife!" || Footprints on the sands of time (pag 346)


 * Lives if great men all remind us (346) || * "Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait."

pg. 346
 * "Be not like dumb driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife!" || | "Footprints on the sands of time".

"Let us, then be up and doing ... learn to labor and to wait." || "Learn to labor and to wait." pg. 346 || "Trust no Future howe'er pleasant! Let the dsead Past bury its dead! Act -Act in the living present!" pg 346 || "We can make our lives sublime"-(pg. 346)

"Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers," pg 345 || "Act-act in the living and the present."(pg 364)

"Life is real! Life is earnest"-(pg.345) ||  ||   || “What I Must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” (page 365, Lines 30-31) || * They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the devil) pg 364 || * "Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
 * "Self-Reliance" || * “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”
 * "Trust thyself"(pg.364) "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. (pg. 363)


 * "To be great is to be misunderstood"
 * "For nocomfomity the world whips you with its displeasure"(pg.366)
 * "conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide..."
 * "the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude..."
 * "What I must do concerns me, not what the people think." (pg. 365) || * "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think." pg. 365


 * "To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,-that is genius" (pg 532).

"What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?" (pg 364) || "No law can be sacred." (pg. 364) || "Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks... though it contradict every thing you said today." || "Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events." || "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." || " If a plant cannot live according to to its nature; it dies; and so as a man. pg. 376 || * "If the injustice is part of the neccessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smoothly, -certainly the machine will wear out." (pg 373)
 * "Civil Disobedience" || * "ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America."
 * "If a plant cannot live according to its nature; it dies; and so a man." p. 376 || If a plant cannot live according to its nature; it dies; and so does man."
 * "Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine." (pg 373)
 * "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion." || Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.(pg 373) || If a Plant cannot live according to its nature;it dies; and so a man.- pg376 ||  ||   || "Unjust Laws exsist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them untill we have succeded or shall we transgress at once?" " I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward."

"Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?" || || "Let us spend one day deliberately as nature." (pg. 847) || “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan like as to put to rout all that was not life…” pg. 383
 * "Walden" || * "Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
 * "I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand;" (pg.383)
 * " I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself."
 * "If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point" || "What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." (page 847) || "lets us spend one day as deliberty as nature"


 * "An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest."

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand" (pg 892 || "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." (pg 290)

"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..." ||  || "My instinct tells me that my head is an oragn for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills." pg. 386 ||
 * Poetry of Whitman || * "I celebrate myself, and sing myself"
 * "I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world."
 * " Each singing what belongs to him/her and to no one else." pg. 397 || " I BEQUETH MYSELF TO THE DIRT TO GROW FROM THE GRASS I LOVE."

"Flow on the river! flow with the flood tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide" (pg 1061) || "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses"

"I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself." (pg.1051) || "But I, with mournful tread, Walk the deck my captain lies, Fallen cold and dead." || "The Day that belongs to the day" I Hear America Signing Pg. 397 ||  || "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses"


 * "And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them." || " For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. " pg. 400 ||