Quotes About Essence

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.

Space really means the level of awareness or presence, not thinking. So, can you look at your partner and not think? Two conscious beings realize that the essence of the relationship is the space in it. Even when there is an egoic overlay, it is not too dense or heavy for you to sense the essence underneath it. You don't need to react to the egoic overlay. When you don't react to it you don't strengthen it.

The elemental fact, present in our consciousness every moment of our existence, is: I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.... The essence of the humane spirit is: Preserve life, promote life, help life to achieve its highest destiny. The essence of Evil is: Destroy life, harm life, hamper the development of life

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

You are the Essence of the Essence, The intoxication of Love. I long to sing Your Praises but stand mute with the agony of wishing in my heart !

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.

If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.

I don't think people change. I think they definitely mature. But I think the essence of what I am today is the same as when I was five years old. It's just maturity. I've become a healthier, fuller expression of that essence.

Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.

The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

Repose is the secret of all contemplation and meditation, the secret of getting in tune with that aspect of life which is the essence of all things. When one is not accustomed to take repose, one does not know what is behind one's being.

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

Somewhere there is an essence. It is not a physical somewhere. There is no sense of world, of time and space. That is nirvana.

I'll tell you truly: I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand

In the process of deeply accepting our own inner experience, instead of being identified with a story of a limited self, we realize the compassion and wakefulness that is our essence.

He who gives only what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice.

The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.

I can't impersonate someone. That is not what I do. I can only take someone's essence and create a character out of that.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

The thing about Bob Dylan's performative essence is that he keeps singing these old songs as well as the new songs, and the old songs become new with new arrangements and new contexts as time goes by.

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

Love is the very essence of life. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet it is more than the end of the rainbow. Love is the security for which children weep, the yearning of youth, the adhesive that binds marriage, and the lubricant that prevents devastating friction in the home; it is the peace of old age, the sunlight of hope shinning through death.

I think it's always important to put your own spin and bring your essence to whatever character you play.

Love is basic for the birth of a true society, while violence has in it the essence of anti-sociality. Love is positive, is eternal: violence is degeneracy, it is it's own destruction.

Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom

The history of humanity is the history of human freedom...Freedom is not, as Engels thought, "the recognition of necessity." Freedom is the opposite of necessity. Freedom is necessity overcome. Progress is, in essence, the progress of human freedom. Yes, and after all, life itself is freedom. The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom.

The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.

He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.

If you're playing someone who has lived, there's the risk of imitation, or whether you focus on the essence of who that character was as opposed to physical mannerisms. So, you have to figure out what it is ultimately that this particular adaptation of the story, whether it's fiction or not, is trying to say.

You can get the true essence of New Yorkers by just hanging out in Central Park

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead - and failing forward.

'Spice Girls' is about unifying the world - every age, every gender, everyone. It's woman power, it's an essence, a tribe.

The real essence of work is concentrated energy.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.

Choice is the essence of what I believe it is to be human.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

Skepticism literally means a thoughtful inquiry, the looking at a problem in a disinterested spirit, the surveying of a question from many sides. In this sense it is the very essence of philosophy and science.

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.

If all our common-sense notions about the universe were correct, then science would have solved the secrets of the universe thousands of years ago. The purpose of science is to peel back the layer of the appearance of the objects to reveal their underlying nature. In fact, if appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science.