QUINTESSENCE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Quintessence

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/kwɪntˈɛsəns/ Listen

noun

Quintessence n.

The fifth or last and highest essence or power in a natural body. See Ferment oils, under Ferment. (Obs.) Note: The ancient Greeks recognized four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. The Pythagoreans added a fifth and called it nether, the fifth essence, which they said flew upward at creation and out of it the stars were made. The alchemists sometimes considered alcohol, or the ferment oils, as the fifth essence.

Hence: An extract from anything, containing its rarest virtue, or most subtle and essential constituent in a small quantity; pure or concentrated essence. "Let there be light, said God; and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep."

The most characteristic form or most perfect example of some type of object.

verb

Quintessence v. t. To distil or extract as a quintessence; to reduce to a quintessence. (R.) "Truth quintessenced and raised to the highest power."

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Etymology of 'Quintessence'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Quintessence" Quotes from Famous Books

... does not accurately name a single one of the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love—gallant "service," "adoration," and "purity"—while "patience and impatience" may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods ...

— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... man gone mad? That he had! And in the blood-red haze that hung before his glittering eyes was framed the face of the girl who had spurned him but a few days before. She was the embodiment of love that had crossed his path and stirred up the very quintessence of evil within him. From the first she had drawn him. From the first she had aroused within his soul a conflict of emotions such as he had never known before. And from the night when, in the Hawley-Crowles box at the opera he had held ...

— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... the fight with the Boeig, gigantic gelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds in recklessness anything else written since the second part of Faust. The third act, culminating with the drive to Soria Moria Castle and the death of Ase, is of the very quintessence of poetry, and puts Ibsen in the first rank of creators. In the fourth act, the introduction of which is abrupt and grotesque, we pass to a totally different and, I think, a lower order of imagination. The fifth act, an amalgam of what is worst ...

— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... System of Nature brought into the circle there. "But we could not conceive," he says, "how such a book could be dangerous. It came to us so gray, so Cimmerian, so corpse-like, that we could hardly endure its presence; we shuddered before it as if it had been a spectre. It struck us as the very quintessence of ...

— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... sire's were a difficult part; You're a byway to suicide, Adela Chart; But to read of, depicted by exquisite James, O, sure you're the flower and quintessence ...

— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

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