Future state is an illusion for the ever present state. It is not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does; when we are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time.
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I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual. We are always balked of a complete success. No prosperity is promised to that. We have our indemnity only in the success of that to which we belong. That is immortal, and we only through that.
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As soon as thought is exercised, this belief is inevitable; as soon as virtue glows, this belief confirms itself. It is a kind of summary or completion of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882
http://www.alcott.net/alcott/home/champions/Emerson.html
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an essayist, philosopher, poet, and leader of the New England Transcendentalists. Seven of his ancestors were ministers, and in 1829 Emerson himself became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. In 1832, however, after a critical period of questioning the wisdom and authority of the Christian church, he determined that he could no longer fulfill the responsibilities of the pulpit in good conscience. Emerson resigned from his pastoral appointment and in 1833 settled in Concord, Massachusetts as a writer and lecturer. He married Lydia Jackson, somewhat of a Transcendentalist herself, in 1835. His most detailed statement of belief was presented in his first published book, Nature (1836). This volume has come to be regarded as Emerson’s most original and significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of American Transcendentalism. In 1837 he delivered his address “The American Scholar,” often called America’s literary declaration of independence, before Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society; in 1838 his address before the Harvard Divinity School challenged the very foundations of conservative Unitarianism. Along with Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, as well as many others, he perceived that spiritual knowledge could be directly received by Reason through human intuition. In 1840, with the aid of Margaret Fuller and George Ripley, he founded the Dial, a periodical dedicated to publishing the writings of the Transcendentalists. The “Concord philosopher” eventually traveled the continent spreading his message of spirituality, transcendentalism, and reform.