Quotes About History
[Emerson, Carlyle]
history, quotations, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Home > History > Quotations about History > Emerson's "transcendentalist" approach to history

  Age of the Sage ~ Home   |   Explore our site   |   Download Wisdoms  

Quotes About History
Ralph Waldo Emerson


Ralph Waldo Emerson was a towering figure in American literary and intellectual life during the nineteenth century. His contribution was central to the emergence of that New England Transcendentalism out from which also emerged such figures as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott.

Emerson urged that people should embrace a transcendentalist approach to history as the following quotes about history demonstrate:-


    "A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world."


 


       "There is one mind common to all individual men.
  Of the works of this mind history is the record. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. all the facts of history preëxist as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of this manifold spirit to the manifold world".



 

   
  "We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men;---because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded."


 

 
"History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived."


 

 

Introductory quotations
.
"Central" mysticism insights
.
"Other" spiritual wisdom
.
"Central" poetry insights
.
"Other" poetry wisdom
.
Sources of mysticism quotes

 
 

  Start of
Quotes About History
Ralph Waldo Emerson