Inessential Quotes

#1. There are essential and inessential insanities. The later are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.

Tom Robbins

#2. She knew that in all stories she must be left out-the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people's lives.

Yiyun Li

#3. It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things ...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#4. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.

Peter Zumthor

#5. I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.

Oliver Sacks

#6. And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?

Pope John Paul II

#7. Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

Walter Benjamin

#8. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.

Seneca.

#9. To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

John Drinkwater

#10. Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

Helmut Jahn

#11. Failure is a stripping away of the inessential.

J.K. Rowling

#12. The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are.

Konrad Lorenz

#13. The name one gives is inessential.
What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by other name would smell as sweet.

Walpola Rahula

#14. [T]he vanity of the contents" of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests " ... since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#15. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.

Tom Robbins

#16. I don't have many rules to live by," he'd said. "But here's one. It's simple. Don't put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles
drug or tattoo
and ... no inessential penises either.

Laini Taylor

#17. Saint Thomas declared that woman was an "inessential" being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the accidental character of sexuality.

Simone De Beauvoir

#18. Those who consider the inessential to be essential
And see the essential as inessential Don't reach the essential,
Living in the field of wrong intention

Gautama Buddha

#19. Sometimes, the inessential is essential.

T.L. Rese

#20. There are certain inessential activities-moths of precious time-and it is worse to busy yourself with the trivial than to do nothing.

Baltasar Gracian

#21. Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was.

J.K. Rowling

#22. The art of concentration is a continual letting go. We let go of what is inessential or distracting. We let go of a thought or a feeling, not because we are afraid of it or because we can't bear to acknowledge it as a part of our experience; but, because it is UNNECESSARY.

Sharon Salzberg

#23. Of course, they haven't seen your reports yet. (Joe)
'They would have if Carlos could have held a gun on the computer to make that piece of shit send an e-mail.' (Carlos)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#24. Everyone was laughin'. Even that deaf mute boy was breathing heavy and pointing at me. Which is laughter to their kind.

Dave Attell

#25. To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

David McCullough

#26. Mick's album was called She's the Boss, which said it all. I've never listened to the entire thing all the way through. Who has? It's like Mein Kampf. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it.

Keith Richards

#27. I was middle class and fucked up and spoilt.

Sara Sheridan

#28. If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.

Albert Oehlen

#29. The heart wants what the heart wants. Beyond common sense. Beyond higher reason.

Katy Regnery

#30. Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he's the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He's got a great sense of humor.

Kevin Spacey

#31. The irony is lost on you.

Courtney Cole

#32. Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state.

Michel De Montaigne

#33. Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

Evelyn Waugh