Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable

The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

I believe that the labor that is congenial is always the true essence of the happiness that one cam ever has.

Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment, without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourish faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

Freedom of the press is not just important, it is essential for a functioning democracy.

In every success story, you will find someone who has made a courageous decision.

Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream. Antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy

Pleasure and pain are only aspects of the mind. Our essential nature is happiness

We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the language of the world.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

Prayer has become as essential to me as the heaving of my lungs, and the beating of my pulse.

The Lord is infinitely good, essentially. He is growingly good, experimentally.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Matter is nothing except the resistance it offers me, yet matter is never without an essential form of its own.

The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don’t meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it’s essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you’re going to be an actor.

A good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through life. It is therefore highly important that you should endeavour not only to be learned but virtuous.

The defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. This point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (Now Lord) Healey, many years ago: ‘Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperiled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.’

I am working in Paris . I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.

The essential question is not, “How busy are you?” but “What are you busy at?”

We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness.

Scientific method, although in its more refined forms it may seem complicated, is in essence remarkably simply. It consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question. The two stages, first of observation, and second of inference to a law, are both essential, and each is susceptible of almost indefinite refinement. (1931)

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

Change is difficult but often essential to survival.