Essentials quotes
1.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside essentials — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I should do something about the cigarettes; I quite accept that it's bad for your health, but you know a moderate tipple is positively beneficial and, at certain times, absolutely essential."
"Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it."
"Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order."
"Diversity is essential to happiness and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social systems."
"The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition."
"Nature conceals her mystery by her essential grandeur."
"Discussion and argument are essential parts of science; the greatest talent is the ability to strip a theory until the simple basic idea emerges with clarity."
"But most Canadians have recognized to a greater or lesser extent that despite much of the so-called progress of the affluent society, essential ingredients to a meaningful life seem to be either entirely lacking, or at best, difficult to grasp."
"When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which are regarded as quote unquote essential, the education is regarded inessential."
"The ability to break a loved one's heart is the essential contradiction in human relationships."
"Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing."
"Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers."
"Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life."
"Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential."
"I am not in the business of predicting general stock market of business fluctuations. If you think I can do this, or think it is essential to an investment program, you should not be in the partnership."
"A watch is the most essential part of a lecture."
"No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report."
"Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question."
"Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals."
"There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories."
