Essence quotes
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside essence — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The essence of wealth is the capacity to control the forces of nature, and the extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge."
"The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human."
"Right here where you and I stand, we shall behold a true and radiant world. In that world, we shall dance only our divine essence."
"Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?"
"To reflect on the essence of the Creator ... is forbidden to the human intellect because of the severance of all relation between the two existences."
"The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile."
"The essence of spiritual life is simply to use our free will properly."
"The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province ofwoman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman."
"The friend who knows a lot more than you do will bring difficulties, and grief, and sickness, as medicine, as happiness, as the essence of the moment when you're beaten when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say, I trust you to kill me."
"I believe love is what makes the world go round. No matter how old or young, love is why we are here. It is the very essence of one's being."
"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."
"When you know who you truly are, there is an abiding alive sense of peace. You could call it joy because that's what joy is: vibrantly alive peace. It is the joy of knowing yourself as the very life essence before life takes on form. That is the joy of Being - of being who you truly are."
"War in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them. So much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group."
"What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
"The best way to protect your own freedom is to watch everybody else's back. That's the essence of community."
"Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man."
"The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different."
"The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man."
"Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life"
"One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?"
