Quotes About Essence

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

One of the main lessons of bioelectromagnetism so far is that less is often more.

How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?

a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total.

You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him.

The truth of one's own real nature is that it is an undivided oneness:

Nothing more can be predicated of the Self than its existence.

This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it's the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we're naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

Some of our mental machinery is exquisitely geared to that function, including the essence-preservation machinery that makes our enemies more readily blameworthy for bad behavior than our allies and makes it easy to witness the suffering of our enemies with indifference.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we're naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

Philip K. Dick died and now we only need what is strictly necessary.

Todo nace en el corazón como de la nada nace el gusano en el corazón de la manzana.

But a living is not a life.

Changes were the essence of life; one should not dread change.

Ah, Fitz, Fitz, we are who we are and who we ever must be.

No end, his words promised her. Life did not end. After thought, she found she shared his conviction. No final blackness to fear, no sudden stopping of being. Changes and mutations, yes, but those things went on with every breath. Changes were the essence of life; one should not dread change.

How many doesn't matter after one," Chade had said. "We know what we are. Quantity makes you neither better nor worse.

Clerres is the heart of the world, and the heartbeat of the world must always be steady.

We do not share. We are one. I am no longer a wolf, you are no longer a man. What we are together, I have no name for. Perhaps the one who spoke to us of the Old Blood would have a word to explain it. He paused. See how much a man I am, that I speak of having a word for an idea? No word is needed. We exist, and we are whatever we are.

What Frazer called "'the savage mind" (as if it did not think through us still) believed that the soul or essence of a creature resided in its blood. If so, then she must have appeared even more awesome, for she could bleed but retain her soul. And if he, the hero, could not, then perhaps he could make another soul bleed and so increase his own powers by that other's blood: the sacrament, the war. What she would spill for life, he would spill for death.

never overlook the power of simplicity

Because it's a person

It doesn't matter who she is, it matters who you are.