Quotes About Essence

No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?

The spiritual self is the deepest, most integrated aspect of who we are.

When you're walking down the street, or you're at a restaurant, someone catches your eye because they have their own look. It goes way beyond what they're wearing - into their mannerisms, the way they smile, or just the way they hold themselves.

One of my recent acquisitions. It is called a medicine bag, from one of the native tribes of North America. A fascinating people, highly skilled in the use of plants' power. They too understand nature's essence as divine. So much so that they do not think it is man's place to own the land at all. Imagine that – think of all the wars we would have missed!

Plants make the air! Do you understand what that means? Our food, our air, our very lives come from the plants. How could they not be of divine origin, of divine intelligence? How can we deny that, in some essential way, they are no less than you or I?

Suggested Readings Conze, Edward. Buddhism: Its Essence and Development. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1951/ 2003. A short philosophical primer on the essence of Buddhism. Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. The Art of Happiness: A Guide for Living. New York: Riverhead. 1998. A sales pitch for Buddhism as a way to be happy. Flanagan, Owen. The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized.

A word is like a finger pointing at different things. Do not look at the finger; focus on the essence of the word. Focus on what the finger is pointing at!

A vessel's beauty does not determine how much water it carries.

Love is God inside out.

Love is the heartbeat of the universe; without it, everything dies.

The greatest universe is the one within you.

The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can't reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.

You couldn't be a little bit human in the same way you couldn't be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn't even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah, maybe being human was to make no sense.

You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum.

we are more than can be measured. We are life itself.

It is in the "being" not the "doing.

The only thing we need is to exist.

Viata e ceea ce ramane cand dai la o parte toate porcariile alea sau, cand le ignori o vreme.

Creativity and imagination are not frosting on a cake: They are integral to our sustainability. They are survival mechanisms. They are of the essence of who we are. They constitute our deepest empowerment.

every herb and poison ultimately has a primal essence or identity pattern and this, whether delivered in a gentle or a toxic envelope, possesses curative power.

What strange hesitancy, fear, or apathy stops us from looking within ourselves, from trying to grasp the true essence of joy and sadness, desire and hatred? Fear of the unknown prevails, and the courage to explore that inner world fails at the frontier of our mind.

The notion of characters, as the traditional form of the novel, is only one of the compromises by which the writer, drawn out of himself by literature in search of its essence, tries to salvage his relations with the world and himself.

The essence of literature is to escape any essential determination, or any affirmation which stabilises or even realises it: it is never already there; it is always to be found or to be reinvented.