#essence

We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something, run a marathon. ↗

— Emil Zatopek

#essence #experience #marathon #men #meters

In essence, we are deeper than being; we are character, which contains the conscious forces of love, justice, kindness, faith, and forgiveness. ↗

— Garey Gordon

#essence #faith #love #faith

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#ambition #democracy #egalitarianism #equality #essence

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest. ↗

— Lyman Abbott

#essence #faculty #highest #lord #man

In consumer life we become what we consume-disposable junk to be used and thrown away. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#consumption #essence-of-life #life

When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#materialism #obssession #life

This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ↗

— William Shakespeare

#piece-of-work #quintessence-of-dust #shakespeare #soliloquy #william-shakespeare

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule. ↗

— Anita Brookner

#after #become #beginning #essence #impossibility

Advertising is the very essence of democracy. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#democracy #essence #very

These humiliations are the essence of the game. ↗

— Alistair Cooke

#game #humiliations #these