"General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living."
Read quote
3 likes
Essence quotes
Essence
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Essence
Browse quotes that often appear alongside essence — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Essence quotes (page 26 of 97)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary."
Read quote
3 likes
"The essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old."
Read quote
3 likes
"Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance."
Read quote
3 likes
"Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted."
Read quote
3 likes
"The genuine essence of truth never dies."
Read quote
3 likes
"Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh."
Read quote
3 likes
"Forget the cringing selves you sometimes are and remember, instead, the magic essence of your own being that sings even now through your fingertips. That is the reality which you are seeking. Experience it fully."
Read quote
3 likes
"It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at."
Read quote
3 likes
"The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power."
Read quote
3 likes
"I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things)."
Read quote
3 likes
"Love is the essence of the universe,. Love in action is service."
Read quote
3 likes
"Every epoch which seeks renewal first projects its ideal into a human form. In order to comprehend its own essence tangibly, the spirit of the time chooses a human being as its prototype and raising this single individual, often one upon whom it has chanced to come, far beyond his measure, the spirit enthuses itself for its own enthusiasm."
Read quote
3 likes
"Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.... Freedom is of the essence, because you should be able to stop and go on and follow this way or that as the freak takes you.... There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow to jar on the meditative silence of the morning."
Read quote
3 likes
"Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology."
Read quote
3 likes
"All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation."
Read quote
3 likes
"The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question."
Read quote
3 likes
"All law has its essence in causation."
Read quote
3 likes
"Gita and Ganga constitute the essence of Hinduism; one its theory and the other its practice."
Read quote
3 likes
"The essence of our Faith consists simply in this freedom of the Ishta."
Read quote
3 likes