Quotes About Essence

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person.

Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.

He isn't so interested in what things mean as in what they are.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. "Warrior gene" my ass.

the KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid (or Keep It Super Simple)

Surely the flowers of a hundred spring are simply the souls of beautiful things!

Surely the flowers of a hundred springs are simply the souls of beautiful things!

A good title can save a book

It's not so much

at the center of my life

Los juicios, en definitiva, nos acercan o nos alejan de los otros, y hay que saber hacerlos a un lado para poder captar la verdadera esencia de cualquier persona. Esto suena muy fácil, pero no lo es. (P. 186)

hay acciones en la vida a las que no hay que darles tanta importancia, si éstas no modifican lo esencial.

plot, for Agatha, meant distillation of character.

Mercy will get you killed, but sometimes it's all that makes us human.

I found Shanghai to be the very essence of the Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane. - Damian Adler

Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold—the meaning of the pattern.

Being is the great explainer.

All things are from water and all things are resolved into water.

No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.