Quotes on Essentials

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.

Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.

Feeling good about ourselves is essential in our being able to love others.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reigns supreme.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

ٰ"The Most difficult thing but an essential one – is to love Life, to love it even while one suffers, because Life is all, Life is God, and to love Life means to love God.

While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.

I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

Tolerance, inter-cultural dialogue and respect for diversity are more essential than ever in a world where peoples are becoming more and more closely interconnected.

Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.

Often the deep valleys of our PRESENT will be UNDERSTOOD only by LOOKING BACK on them from the mountains of our FUTURE experience. Often we can’t see the LORD’S HAND in our lives until long after the trials have passed. Often the most difficult times of our lives are ESSENTIAL building blocks that form the FOUNDATION of our CHARACTER and pave the way to FUTURE opportunity, understanding, and happiness.

Anything whose presence or absence makes no discernible difference is no essential part of the whole.

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.