Quotes About Essence

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world... of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as substance and essence of man, and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as self-consciousness and the Unique.

The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: 'Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but rather for presenting what is as the essence of the state. The claim that the rational is actual is contradicted precisely by an irrational actuality, which everywhere is the contrary of what it asserts and asserts the contrary of what it is.

Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents implement it while combating its reality; they want to appropriate for, themselves as a most precious ornament what they have rejected as an ornament of human nature. No man combats freedom; at most he combats the freedom of others. Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, at another as a universal right.

As you can see, instead of HAVING...DOING...BEING, life works in better harmony when you are BEING...DOING...HAVING. After all, you are NOT a human HAVE-ing nor a Human DO-ing. You are a human BE-ing.

Bodies are just leftovers, not the real event on death.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

It turned out that love was everything after all 

Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is.

Old man's gotta be the old man. Fish has got to be the fish. Gotta be who you are in this world, no matter what.

A man's life is an appendix to his heart.

In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

Care I for the limb, the thews, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man! Give me the spirit.

Sin is more than an act or a series of acts; it is a man's make-up.

It's the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.

Verily God does not reward man for what he does, but for what he is.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?