Essence Quotes (5)
From whence it is obvious to conclude that, since our Faculties are not fitted to penetrate into the internal Fabrick and real Essences of Bodies; but yet plainly discover to us the Being of a GOD, and the Knowledge of our selves, enough to lead us into a full and clear discovery of our Duty, and great Concernment, it will become us, as rational Creatures, to imploy those Faculties we have about what they are most adapted to, and follow the direction of Nature, where it seems to point us out the way.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Edited by Peter Nidditch (1975), Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 11, 646.
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known—that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
Life Against Death: the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1985), 254.
In our search after the Knowledge of Substances, our want of Ideas, that are suitable to such a way of proceeding, obliges us to a quite different method. We advance not here, as in the other (where our abstract Ideas are real as well as nominal Essences) by contemplating our Ideas, and considering their Relations and Correspondencies; that helps us very little, for the Reasons, and in another place we have at large set down. By which, I think it is evident, that Substances afford Matter of very little general Knowledge; and the bare Contemplation of their abstract Ideas, will carry us but a very little way in the search of Truth and Certainty. What then are we to do for the improvement of our Knowledge in Substantial beings? Here we are to take a quite contrary Course, the want of Ideas of their real essences sends us from our own Thoughts, to the Things themselves, as they exist.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Edited by Peter Nidditch (1975), Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 9, 644.
See also: | Abstract (5) | Contemplation (5) | Existence (44) | Idea (83) | Knowledge (330) | Knowledge (330) | Matter (61) | Method (12) | Reason (69) | Relation (5) | Substance (7) | Thought (65)
The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
Widely quoted, but without citation, for example in Eve Herold, George Daley, Stem Cell Wars (2007), 119. If you know a primary source, please contact Webmaster, who meanwhile believes this might be a popular summary of Aristotle's philosophy, and not his actual statement in these words.
The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it becomes even more so when, with the application of science, it extends its scope and intensifies the power of its action. If there is a devil in history, it is this power principle.
In Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov, Max Nettlau, The political philosophy of Bakunin (1953), 248.
See also: | Abstraction (4) | Action (16) | Application (11) | Bestial (2) | Carnivorous (2) | Development (20) | Devil (4) | Extend (2) | Fiction (3) | History (61) | Ideal (8) | Influence (9) | Instinct (13) | Instinct (13) | Instrument (8) | Mental (2) | Power (19) | Primitive (3) | Reason (69) | Savage (5) | Science (444) | Scope (2) | Servant (3)
