The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.
Charles Darwin

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet.
Theodore Hesburgh

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
Carl Rogers

The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.
Chuck Jones

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
Robert Louis Stevenson

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere.
Hermann Hesse

These humiliations are the essence of the game.
Alistair Cooke

They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.
Constantin Brancusi

This subsistence, or manner of being of God is his one essence so far as it has personal properties.
William Ames

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.
Honore Gabriel Riquet

To enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction and to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn't apparent because it's shrouded by sensation and delusion.
Bodhidharma

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.
Kim Weston

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
Thomas Carlyle

Unlike the phone system, which is engineered around an application, the Internet layered model allows you to, in essence, separate applications from infrastructure.
Michael K. Powell

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

We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.
Martin Heidegger

What I learned as an actor was the only way you could really do August Wilson's work, you had to leave an ounce of your essence on that stage,... Otherwise it was impossible.
Charles S. Dutton