Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Truth, goodness, and beauty are ever‑emerging qualities that the universe celebrates.
In plain terms
The cosmos constantly creates truth, goodness, and beauty.
What can you take from it?
Recognize and cherish these emerging virtues.

Where it applies

  • in artistic creation
  • during moral decisions
  • while studying nature

Putting it to work

  • seek truth
  • cultivate beauty

Questions to consider

  • How do you identify moments of emerging beauty?
  • Can truth be separated from goodness?

Another view

These concepts can be subjective and culturally variable.

More from Henry David Thoreau

  1. You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying exis…

    Permalink to quote #12
  2. Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spr…

    Permalink to quote #14
  3. Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so co…

    Permalink to quote #11

Related quotes

  1. Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by artist…

    Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell quote #165
  2. The Beautiful exists just as little as the True. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man w…

    Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche quote #199
  3. Of late, men seem to have been possessed by an incomprehensible impulse to strip themselves of everything with which nature has endowed them in order to make t…

    Eugene DelacroixEugene Delacroix quote #2