Essay PYQs

A good leader is one who follows the followers.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

Nature is the symbol of the spirit.

Thought finds a world and creates one also.

The process of self-discovery has now been technologically outsourced.

The real is rational and the rational is real.

Shelving hard decisions is the least ethical course.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ship is for.

A grateful mind is very beautiful.

Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty.

Philosophy of wantlessness is Utopian, while materialism is a chimera.

Visionary decision-making happens at the intersection of intuition and logic.

History is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.

What is research, but a blind date with knowledge.

A thorn is a changed bud.

You cannot step twice in the same river.

There are better practices to “best practices”.

It is best to see life as a journey, not as a destination.

There is no path to happiness; Happiness is the path.

Not all who wander are lost.

When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.

Best lessons are learnt through bitter experiences.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but to test the character, give him power.

Truth knows no colour.

Your perception of me is a reflection of you; my reaction to you is an awareness of me.

Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.

Forests are the best case studies for economic excellence.

The years teach much which the days never know.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

Oxymorons reflect the ironies of life.

Mathematics is the music of reason.

A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.

A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.

Just because you have a choice, it does not mean that any of them has to be right.

Thinking is like a game, it does not begin unless there is an opposite team.

Inspiration for creativity springs from the effort to look for the magical in the mundane.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands, two equally harmful disciplines.

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

The doubter is a true man of science.

Social media is triggering the ‘fear of missing out’ amongst the youth, precipitating depression and loneliness.

All ideas having large consequences are always simple.