Essence quotes
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"By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence."
"One graphic element captured the essence of spring"
"In France, the leader of Jacobinism perished on the guillotine; with us, the change of leadership was achieved by means of arrest and banishment. The technique of the process is gentler, but its essence is the same."
"The good painter must paint two things: a person and the essence of his soul."
"The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence."
"Every man starts with all there is. Everything is here-the essence and substance of all there is."
"The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government."
"If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?"
"Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge."
"Capitalism cannot be reduced to one or a few features, but it does possess one relationship, central to its existence and operation, that constitutes the essence of inequality and ineradicable instability: the wage-labor-capital connection that dwells at the heart of the system."
"Man's existence precedes his essence"
"Existence is prior to essence."
"The essences of all religions speak of peace, compassion, justice and the interconnection of all life."
"When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself to be in the world as in a great, beautiful, noble, and valued whole, when harmonious ease affords him a pure and free delight, then the universe, if it could experience itself, would exult, as having attained its goal, and admire the climax of its own becoming and essence."
"Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears."
"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams."
"The essence of life consists in thinking, and being conscious of one's soul."
"There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work."
"For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not."
"I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations."
