Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it’s soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom ‘to’ and freedom ‘from.’
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
I mean, I’ve done college basketball, a horse race, a bunch of different things and they’d blow by but golf has a frenetic pace of bouncing around from shot to shot and green to green and, in essence, acre to acre over this huge plot of land with over 150 players who are their own team.
Once you start out, you are kind of finding out who you are, and then by the time you get to the second album or you’ve been touring a lot, doing live shows or whatever, the sound starts to shift slightly to something that is more the true essence of what the band really is.
No matter what you’re doing, whether it’s a makeup tutorial or an interview or a lip sync, performance is the essence of drag. It is gender performance. Being able to produce a performance is what a superstar has to do.
The Founders didn’t mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.
Many people think that discipline is the essence of parenting. But that isn’t parenting. Parenting is not telling your child what to do when he or she misbehaves. Parenting is providing the conditions in which a child can realize his or her full human potential.
This is the essence of the American Dream – in the land of opportunity, if you have a good idea, create a solid plan, and work hard, you should be able to reinvent yourself and get ahead.
In essence, big stars come with a set image, and breaking it becomes a task for certain stories.
A lot of my characters are people who are, in essence, lying to themselves. They present one thing, when in reality they’re another thing. Maybe they’re not as tough or as cool as they want to be.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
Man seeks to change the foods available in nature to suit his tastes, thereby putting an end to the very essence of life contained in them.
Christianity, with or without its whole apparatus of dogma, will endure in its essence for thousands of years after us; there will always be spiritually-minded people who will be ennobled by it, and some made great.
Hawking has violated the unspoken rules of atheism. He isn’t supposed to use words like ‘create’ or even ‘made.’ They necessitate a Creator and a Maker. Neither are you supposed to let out that the essence of atheism is to believe that nothing created everything, because it’s unthinking.
In essence, I’m a sophisticated cotton picker.
The first time I recorded without Allen Toussaint, I wanted to do doo-wop. Everything I’ve done since then has got some kind of doo-wop essence in it.
The essence of Hinduism is the same essence of all true religions: Bhakti or pure love for God and genuine compassion for all beings.
I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything – I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it’s like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that’s what they were doing; it’s like a message from another culture.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
It is thus necessary to examine all things according to their essence, to infer from every species such true and well established propositions as may assist us in the solution of metaphysical problems.
I don’t play any instruments. I don’t produce. I don’t know which keys or chords I am using, so, in essence, I need the band and the production team – otherwise, I am just some guy with a hat and a song.
I usually listen to various kind of singers. Curtis Mayfield was my favorite. James Brown, Tina Turner, queen of soul, I started to get that musical essence from that time before I even do my first song.
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.
If you don’t like this, we don’t care – I think that’s the essence of what popular music should be.
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature’s only irreducible essence… I had to place myself amidst the variation.
There are some people that look at faith as a part of their life, and there are those like me that look at faith as the essence of their life. I look at all things through my faith.
The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present.
The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels – the essence of the Greens’ theory of global warming – has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism.
I really like to go for the essence of things – the most beautiful parts of things – of human beings or of music. If there are things in there that are getting in the way and complicating it, it’s just not good for me.
The woman with dark hair, wide hips, and a few extra pounds has always been the essence of beauty in Morocco.
The essence of the stage is concentration and penetration. Of the screen action, movement, sweep.
The essence of my work, and of me, is the softer side of a strong woman, and that goes into a number of different roles.
The essence of the Hebrew Bible, transmitted by Christianity, is separation: between life and death, nature and God, good and evil, man and woman, and the holy and the profane.
Sometimes it feels very homophobic when people try to make their stance and their beliefs, and there’s been some very painful, ugly things that have been said… that not have always been in the essence of a heart for Christ.
By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.
What is the essence of theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man.
I’ve taken a look back at my body of work and tried to deduce an essence, capturing aspects that reoccur. Reflecting on your own product can be difficult yet enthralling.
The way we’re going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That’s where you get the most out of it.
He who gives what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self sacrifice.
As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.
Remember that the essence of authority is that people willingly follow your lead.
Every man’s heart one day beats its final beat. His lungs breathe a final breath. And if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them bleed deeper and something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized.
What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me – the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm – that seems to me to be of the essence.
For my first fragrance, I wanted to capture the essence of a woman’s strength and beauty.
No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
In any adaptation, the challenge is to take the essence of the original source of the material, be faithful to it to a point, but to also recognize that you’re telling a story in a very different medium. It has to exist on its own, and it has to offer something unique to that experience.
It’s the essence of sport to be able to swallow tough things up.
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
I feel like if you boil supernatural ghost films down to their core essence, they’re really about death.
I think mistakes are the essence of science and law. It’s impossible to conceive of either scientific progress or legal progress without understanding the important role of being wrong and of mistakes.
Sometimes, when you live a life at such a wild edge, an extreme edge of experience, you can come back into the world – if you come back at all – with some essence from that experience that people find useful.
