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Essentialism Quotes

Browse 29 quotes about Essentialism.

Essentialism Quotes

“The urge is irresistible to ask, are we an essential part of the plan and architecture of the universe? Is there a purpose to the universe? Of course one can immediately counter such questions by asking what one means by 'essential part' and 'purpose'. Perhaps such questions are improperly posed and should not be asked, but it cannot be denied that these questions arise in the mind.”

UniverseExistenceHumanPurpose Of LifeEssentialism
Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“Mencius said: “In good years, young men are mostly fine. In bad years, they’re mostly cruel and violent. It isn’t that Heaven endows them with such different capacities, only that their hearts are mired in such different situations. Think about barley: if you plant the seeds carefully at the same time and in same place, they’ll all sprout and grow ripe by summer solstice. If they don’t grow the same – it’s because of inequities in richness of soil, amounts of rainfall, or the care given them by farmers. And so, all members belonging to a given species of thing are the same. Why should humans be the lone exception? The sage and I – surely we belong to the same species of thing. “That’s why Master Lung said: Even if a cobbler makes a pair of sandals for feet he’s never seen, he certainly won’t make a pair of baskets. Sandals are all alike because feet are the same throughout all beneath Heaven. And all tongues savor the same flavors. Yi Ya was just the first to discover what our tongues savor. If taste differed by nature from person to person, the way horses and dogs differ by species from me, then how is it people throughout all beneath Heaven savor the tastes Yi Ya savored? People throughout all beneath Heaven share Yi Ya’s tastes, therefore people’s tongues are alike throughout all beneath Heaven. “It’s true for the ear too: people throughout all beneath Heaven share Maestro K’uang’s sense of music, therefore people’s ears are alike thoughout all beneath Heaven. And it’s no less true for the eye: no one throughout all beneath Heaven could fail to see the beauty of Lord Tu. If you can’t see his beauty, you simply haven’t eyes. “Hence it is said: All tongues savor the same flavors, all ears hear the same music, and all eyes see the same beauty. Why should the heart alone not be alike in us all? But what is it about our hearts that is alike? Isn’t it what we call reason and Duty? The sage is just the first to discover what is common to our hearts. Hence, reason and Duty please our hearts just like meat pleases our tongues.”

Human NatureEssentialism
Book:Mencius
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“The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. As John Maxwell has written, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practicality everything.”

ValueLessEssentialism
Book:Essentialism The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Deep Work, So Good They Cant Ignore You 3 Books Collection Set
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“I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.”

CharacterFree WillAlienationItalyObjectivitySubjectivityHegelCategorical ImperativeEssentialismPolitical AnimalUniversal Reasons
Book:Contempt
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“I'm a pioneer, I'm an explorer, I'm a human, and I'm coming. I'm animated, I'm alive, my heart's big, it's got hot blood going through it fast. I like to fight, too! I like to eat! I like to have children! I'm here! I've got a life force: This is a human, this is what we look like, this is what we act like, this what everybody was like before us, this is what I am, I'm a throwback. I'm here! I've got the fire of human liberty! I'm setting fires everywhere, and humans are turning on everywhere.”

PhilosophyHumorPoliticsManiaEssentialismAnti Technology
Author:Alex E. Jones
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“Further, when markers of race, gender, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and other factors are the only criteria considered in hiring or admissions, students are cheated, as are those chosen to meet diversity measures on the basis of identity alone. Nothing is more essentialist or constraining than diversity understood strictly in terms of identity.”

HiringAffirmative ActionIdentity PoliticsEssentialismTokenismDiversity In Hiring
Book:Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage
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“Through the radical undoing and debilitation of repeated pain we are reacquainted with the essentialities of place and time and existence itself; in deep pain we have energy only for what we can do wholeheartedly and then, only within a narrow range of motion, metaphorically or physically, from tying our shoelace to holding the essential core conversations that are reciprocal and reinforcing within the close-in circle of those we love. Pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of ourselves and eventually in what we ask in others.”

PainEconomyEssentialsImportanceEssentialism
Book:Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
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“Red Pill writers...have appropriated the texts and history of ancient Greece and Rome to bolster their most abhorrent ideas: that all women are deceitful and degenerate; that white men are by nature more rational than (and therefore superior to) everyone else; that women's sexual boundaries exist to be manipulated and crossed; and, finally, that society as a whole would benefit if men were given the responsibility for making all decisions for women, particularly over their sexual and reproductive choices.”

MisogynyRape CultureEssentialism
Book:Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
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“The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results. And it shows us that we not only should not try to assimilate trans women into a category that remains the same, but that the category itself has to change so it does not simply reflect normative ideas of who counts as women and who doesn’t.”

FeminismGenderAssimilationEssentialismTerf
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
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“Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. [Xenofeminism] is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.”

TransNaturalismEssentialismQueer PoliticsQueer LiberationTrans LiberationTrans JusticeXenofeminism
Book:Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation
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“Darwin’s point about variation often goes unappreciated today in philosophical discussions, even though it has been uncontroversial for well over a century. Recent discussions of natural kinds, prompted by the seminal ideas of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, often assume that one can revive essentialism. Yet if species are natural kinds no such revival is in prospect. Kripke and Putnam largely restricted their discussions to the cases of elements and compounds, and with good reason. For, given the insights of neo-Darwinism, it’s clear that the search for some analogue of the microstructural essences can’t be found. No genetic or karyotypic property will play for species the role that atomic number does for the elements.”

PhilosophyDarwinismEssentialism
Author:Philip Kitcher
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“Essentialism is not abotu how to get more things done; it's about how to get the right things done. It doesn't mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”

EfficiencyEssentialismEssentialist
Book:Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
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“The men of the Red Pill who write about the ancient world would have their readers believe there is a straight line from antiquity to today, a continuity of male and female behavior...this illusion of continuity is actually an ideologically motivated strategy to resurrect ancient norms in the present day.”

GenderMisogynyClassicsEssentialism
Book:Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
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“The art of the High Renaissance is absolutely secular in its outlook; even in the representations of religious subjects, it attains its ideal style not by contrasting natural with supernatural reality, but by creating a distance between the objects of natural reality itself - a distance which in the world of visual experience creates differences of value similar to those that exist between the elite and the masses in human society. Its harmony is the utopian ideal of a world from which all conflicts is excluded, and, moreover, not as a result of the rule of a democratic but of an autocratic principle. Its creations represent an enhanced, ennobled reality exempt from transitoriness and banality. Its most important stylistic principle is the restriction of the representation to the bare essentials.”

ArtPoliticsAristocracyEssentialismAutocraticHigh Renaissance
Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“Many of us then thought that what we needed to do was to expand the category “women” so that it could embrace Black women, Latina women, Native American women, and so forth. We thought that by doing that we would have effectively addressed the problem of the exclusivity of the category. What we didn’t realize then was that we would have to rewrite the whole category, rather than simply assimilate more women in to an unchanged category of what counts as “women.”

FeminismTransformationGenderAssimilationEssentialism
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
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“In gathering data from more than five hundred people about their experience on more than one thousand teams, I have found a consistent reality: When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive. When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations—greater than people even realize they ought to have—in those areas that are truly vital. In my work, I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when teams lack clarity of purpose. PATTERN 1: PLAYING POLITICS In the first pattern, the team becomes overly focused on winning the attention of the manager. The problem is, when people don’t know what the end game is, they are unclear about how to win, and as a result they make up their own game and their own rules as they vie for the manager’s favor. Instead of focusing their time and energies on making a high level of contribution, they put all their effort into games like attempting to look better than their peers, demonstrating their self-importance, and echoing their manager’s every idea or sentiment. These kinds of activities are not only nonessential but damaging and counterproductive.”

PoliticsBusinessCorporationsCareerIncentivesCorporate CultureBusiness CultureEssentialism
Book:Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
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