Quotes about Essential

I used to believe that love was the highest value.  I still believe that love is the highest value.  I don't expect to be happy.  I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy.  I don't think of love as the answer or the solution.  I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving.  And when it burns out, the planet dies.

My little orbit of life circles love.  I daren't get any closer.  I'm not a mystic seeking final communion.  I don't go out without SPF 15.  I protect myself.

But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions.  What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe.

Such a person has nothing to acquire, nor anything to shun. He is untainted by the defects of life, untouched by its sorrow.

He does not come into being nor go out, though he appears to come and go in the eyes of the beholder.

Even religious duties are found to be unnecessary. …His mind has given up its restlessness, and he rests in the bliss that is his essential nature. Such bliss is possible only by self-knowledge, not by any other means. Hence, one should apply oneself constantly to self-knowledge–this alone is one's duty.

It has to be understood that, even though the infinite or intrinsic or essential must be grasped in an "exclusionary" way (cleft apart or distinguished from the finite or extrinsic or accidental), ultimately the two domains belong together as a whole: it is only for the propadeutic purpose of self-clarification or enlightenment that the infinite must be grasped in its relative purity from the finite, a relation of opposition that may mistakenly make the infinite look as finite (oppositional, exclusionary) as the finite (since it is of the essence of the finite to stand in a relation of repellency to its other). The finite excludes everything other, but the infinite HAS no "other." The essential trait of the infinite is its INCLUSIVENESS, its power to embrace all particulars within an organismic whole.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.

What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.

Who does not value silence should not speak.

If it be true that spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation in the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man on earth.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones.  We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.