Essentials quotes
1.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself."
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
"Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials."
"Pleasure and pain are only aspects of the mind. Our essential nature is happiness"
"Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges."
"If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later."
"Individual liberty and interdependence are both essential for life in society."
"It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations."
"Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD."
"A good moral character is the first essential. It is highly important not only to be learned but to be virtuous."
"The essential element in personal magnetism is a consuming sincerity - an overwhelming faith in the importance of the work one has to do."
"Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise."
"Just because we cannot see clearly the end of the road, that is no reason for not setting out on the essential journey. On the contrary, great change dominates the world, and unless we move with change we will become its victims."
"A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus."
"Every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential."
"Prayer is our essential lifeline to God's throne and heart."
"The essential thing is to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality."
"Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher economy. Economy is a distinctive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection."
"The one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight... It should be the growing nation with a future which takes the long look ahead."
"An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn."
