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.
"Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that."
"The Charkha is the symbol of sacrifice, and sacrifice is essential for the establishment of the image of the deity."
"The Charkha is intended to realize the essential and living oneness of interest among India's myriads."
"To get rid of the infatuation for English is one of the essentials of Swaraj."
"I shall content myself with merely declaring my firm conviction that, for the seeker who would live in fear of God and who would see Him face to face, restraint in diet both as to quantity and quality is as essential as restraint in thought and speech."
"People may be said to resemble the pieces of a puzzle, each unique, yet each essential to bring out a complete picture."
"The snow reminded me of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life."
"Initiative is as essential to success as a hub is essential to a wagon wheel."
"One of the most essential yet the hardest truths that I have had to learn is that every person should be his own hardest task-master."
"Had a filling done yesterday with no freezing, natural materials, essentials oils, and homeopathic remedies. We absolutely must push for more holistic biological dentistry."
"Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a' en chacun de nous, mais a' le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation."
"There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order."
"If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injuries and harm, by God I'll confront them!"
"My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential."
"I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning."
"One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine."
"The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing."
"The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity."
"Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism."
"Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?"
