Quotes About Essence

I wandered and roamed through my domain, my private space, smelling its essence, accepting its claim on me and incorporating every dust mote, every spider's web into an orgy of possessive bliss.

As to the properties we call occult in a number of things, like the magnet's ability to attract iron, is it not likely that there are sensitive capacities in nature fit for judging and perceiving them, and that the lack of such capacities produces our ignorance of the true essence of such things? It is perhaps some particular sense that lets cocks know the hour of morning and of midnight, and moves them to crow

Isn't the spiritual search, at its essence, a movement toward objectivity?

He was perfectly conscious of the absurdity of his behavior, but he was incapable of changing it. This absurdity was an essential part of him. It was probably the most basic element of his personality.

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)

The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the 'core' or 'essence' of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth - all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened.

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

Exercising leadership is an expression of your aliveness... But when you cover yourself up, you risk losing something as well. In the struggle to save yourself, you can give up too many of those qualities that are the essence of being alive, like innocence, curiosity, and compassion.

those whom he termed 'primordial characters' of humanity.

We are spiritual beings walking around in these crazy skin suits. Our insides are much more important than our outsides.

Cuanto más te acercas a lo esencial, menos puedes nombrarlo.

La felicidad es minimalista. Es sencilla y desnuda. Es una casi nada que lo es todo.

I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.

She not only taught but lived music, existed for those hours when she could be concentrated in her being—which was half music, half divine light, only flesh to the degree she could not admit otherwise. At the piano keyboard, absorbed into the notes that rose beneath her hands, she existed in her essence, a manifestation of compelling sound.

Deep at the center of my being there is an infinite well of love.

To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negliglible and temporary race called mankind, have any existance at all.

I couldn't live where there were no trees--something vital in me would starve.

The only true animal is a cat, and the only true cat is a gray cat.

God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity , made God in his image.

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.

Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature – qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.

L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.