And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
Orson Welles

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Marcel Proust

Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.
Norman Borlaug

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.
Walter Cronkite

"Love" is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.
Robert A. Heinlein

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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
Alice Walker

Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Ambrose Bierce

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
Gary Ryan Blair

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.
Barney Frank

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.
Barney Frank

Part of our essential humanity is paying respect to what God gave us and what will be here a long time after we're gone.
William J. Clinton

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
Emma Goldman

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

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Jacques Yves Cousteau

Nothing brings me more happiness than trying to help the most vulnerable people in society. It is a goal and an essential part of my life - a kind of destiny. Whoever is in distress can call on me. I will come running wherever they are.
Princess Diana

The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small.
Nikita Khrushchev