John Burroughs Quotes

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would definitely be my homeboy.

Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

When you're reading Thoreau you look at Hollywood differently, let me tell ya!

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.'

Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit.

I'm no Thoreau.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]

I am become a transparent eyeball.

Emerson is a person who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.

My Mt. Rushmore of hero worship would include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcus Aurelius, Frank Sinatra and Barry White.

For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.