What is essential?

More definitions of "essential":

• (adj): Applying to essential legal principles and rules of right.
  Synonyms: substantive

• (adj): Absolutely required and not to be used up or sacrificed.

• (noun): Anything indispensable.
  Synonyms: necessity, requirement, requisite, necessary

• (adj): Of the greatest importance.
  Synonyms: all-important, all important, crucial, of the essence

• (adj): Basic and fundamental.
  Example: "The essential feature"

• (adj): Being or relating to or containing the essence of a plant etc.
  Example: "Essential oil"

Famous quotes containing the word essential:

“Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)

“This is the essential distinction—even opposition—between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer—in actual practice it is rated very low—we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)

“It is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition. It is the business of Art to give things shape. Anyone who takes no delight in the firm outline of an object, or in its essential character, has no artistic sense.... He cannot even be nourished by Art. Like Ephraim, he feeds upon the East wind, which has no boundaries.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)