Essence quotes
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside essence — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it might deify both."
"The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence."
"The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends."
"To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life."
"You're just looking for the thing that makes this scene sort of imperative, why you have to know what changes by the end of the scene so you're really looking to find the essence of it."
"Documentaries are a powerful and effective way of bridging the gap between worlds, breaking through to new audiences that wouldn't otherwise be engaged - in essence, not preaching to the choir."
"Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards."
"To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism."
"He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything."
"He who believes in goodness has the essence of all faith. He is a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows."
"The B.C. spirit bear symbolizes the essence of the spirit of British Columbia. It is a powerful presence and a thing of wonder that lives in a magical land of beauty, grace and unbridled potential."
"When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness, its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being."
"Learning is the very essence of humility . . ."
"Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold The clear religion of heaven!"
"We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action."
"Form displays the relation [to beings] itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open."
"Capitalism is not about the profit motive. Capitalism is about free markets. What you do in the market, in your free will, is the essence of capitalism."
"All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education."
"The essence of all religions is love, compassion, and tolerance. Kindness is my true religion. The clear proof of a person's love of God is if that person genuinely shows love to fellow human beings."
"Buddha was speaking about reality. Reality may be one, in its deepest essence, but Buddha also stated that all propositions about reality are only contingent."
