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
Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .
I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.
Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?
It was Christianity, with its heartfelt resentment against life, that first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the essential fact of our life.