"Quintessence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will cause both to remain unread by the multitude—unnatural comparisons, recondite theology, and a great lack of common humanity. That there was a mutual admiration is found in Southey's declaration that Wordsworth's sonnets contain the profoundest poetical wisdom, and that the Preface is the quintessence of the philosophy ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 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 of dames. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... expectancy, awaits the new spring and the new summer, and every new month and the new year, and thinks that what he longs for is ever too late in coming, and does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the quintessence, the spirit, of the elements, which, finding itself captive in the soul of the human body, desires always to return to its giver. And I would have you know that this same desire is the quintessence which is inseparable from nature, and that man is the model of the world. And such is the supreme ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... words of emotion, with tearful eyes, this breviary on which once prayed that grand soldier; yes, Monsieur, that great believer. She has done nothing to me," he repeated, growing more and more excited, his red face becoming purple with rage, "but they are the quintessence of what I detest the most, people like her and her father. They are the incarnation of the modern world, in which there is nothing more despicable than these cosmopolitan adventurers, who play at grand seigneur ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... some time he hastened towards him with open arms exclaiming, "A happy meeting with the mirror of chivalry, my worthy compatriot Don Quixote of La Mancha, the flower and cream of high breeding, the protection and relief of the distressed, the quintessence of knights-errant!" And so saying he clasped in his arms the knee of Don Quixote's left leg. He, astonished at the stranger's words and behaviour, looked at him attentively, and at length recognised him, very much surprised to see him there, and made great efforts to dismount. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... belong'd to the same Army in which I serv'd, we set out with all Expedition. I don't remember to have been better diverted upon the Road, since I first knew what it was to Travel; one of our Company was a Provincial, and the very Quintessence of Wit and Gaiety. There was not the most trivial Occurrence but he dexterously made use of it to divert us, particularly at a small Village within a Days Journey of Lions. The Bailiff of the Village coming to our Inn to gather ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... snuff! our fashionable end and aim— Strasburgh, Rappe, Dutch, Scotch—whate'er thy name! Powder celestial! quintessence divine New joys entrance my soul while thou art mine; Who takes? who takes thee not? Where'er I range I smell thy sweets from ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... intrinsic quality. That this desire, however, should know how to initiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience and in itself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved. The bitterest quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and our incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are those we feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging themselves indefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous in extreme agony, is present in all pain and is perhaps its essence. If ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... here, I say no more; This is the very Quintessence of Trade, And ev'ry Hope of Gain depends upon it; None who neglect it ever did grow rich, Or ever will, or can by Indian Commerce. By this old Ogden built his stately House, Purchas'd Estates, and grew a little King. He, ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... of fresh adolescence! Around us such raptures celestial they flung That it seemed as if Paradise breathed its quintessence Through the seraph-toned lips of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of Uriel, Which in Paradise befell. Once, among the Pleiads walking, Seyd overheard the young gods talking; And the treason, too long pent, To his ears was evident. The young deities discussed Laws of form, and metre just, Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams, What subsisteth, and what seems. One, with low tones that decide, And doubt and reverend use defied, With a look that solved the sphere, And stirred the devils everywhere, Gave his sentiment divine Against the being of a line. 'Line in nature is not found; Unit and ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... purged from evil in purgatory, and strengthened in good in the first heaven. In one region the extract of sufferings become conscience to deter us from doing wrong, in the other region the quintessence of good is transmuted to benevolence and altruism which are the basis of all true progress. Moreover, purgatory is far from being a place of punishment, it is perhaps the most beneficent realm in nature, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... society. You can see how it combines the excitement of a gaming-table, a duel, and a Roman amphitheatre. The Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand how vapid are all amusements to a man who has acquired a taste for this one. The game we play," he continued, "is one of extreme simplicity. A full pack - but I perceive you are about to see the thing in progress. Will you lend ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Krochmal admits that the resultants from the historical development of a people form the quintessence of its existence. [Footnote: See chapters IX, XVI, and others; also M. Bernfeld, Da'at Elohim ("The Knowledge of God"); and M. Landau, Die Bibel und der Hegelianismus (Dissertation).] But what he does not believe is that the essential element in the existence ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... strange— How far, far off, these happy times appear! All that I have to live I'd gladly change For one such month as I have wasted here— To draw long dreams of beauty, love, and power, From founts of hope that never will outrun, And drink all life's quintessence in an hour: Give me the days when ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... bacteria that infest the world. The theory of monarchy is, no doubt, inferior to the democratic theory in stimulus, but the latter fails in qualitative effect, much more than the former. There, the objector submits, lies the quintessence of the matter. Both systems need watching, need criticism, the pruning knife and the stimulant, and neither is bad enough to justify a revolutionary change to the other. In some such conclusion as this most of the English people with whom one can discuss this ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... given a human being, to remain absolutely stationary. They might be sealed up in the houses where you see them; their faces and their dresses are literally part of the fixtures of the town, and the province in which they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its quintessence, the genius loci incarnate. There is something frigid and monumental about these ladies; they know exactly when to laugh and when to shake their heads, and every now and then give out some utterance which passes ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... man will almost certainly profess a kind of universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them. For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very antithesis of that bickering monopolist who "will have none other gods but Me"; and when a human heart ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... sententious, dogmatic, and, in short, the quintessence of the commonplace. I need not say, therefore, that he is credited by the world with unlimited common-sense. And for once the world is right. He has nothing-original about him, save so much of sin as he may have inherited from our first parents; there is no more at the back of him than at the back ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... dwell in Cooperstown, the village had already made up its mind that he was a rather austere and distant man, an official person, the quintessence of ecclesiastical statesmanship,—urbane, but unyielding. He looked the part. Tall, erect, and of splendid figure, his countenance had the aristocratic beauty of a family noted for its handsome men. The noble head and the poutingly compressed lips ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... active and helpful as possible; but especially she is busy trying to keep the peace between the old house servants and the imported cook. This Sicilian is a notable character. To him cookery is not a handicraft: it is the triumph, the quintessence of all science and philosophy. He talks a strange professional jargon, and asserts that he is himself learned in astronomy—for that teaches the best seasons, e.g. for mackerel and haddock; in geometry,—that he might know how ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... read By those who love and feel as well as think. For books are more than books, they are the life, The very heart and core of ages past, The reason why men lived, and worked, and died, The essence and quintessence of their lives. And we may know them better, and divine The inner motives whence their actions sprang, Far better than the men who only knew Their bodily presence, the soul forever hid From those with no ability to see. They wait ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... us, gentlemen, distilled meats, containing nothing but what is in sympathy and affinity with our body. Nothing would be used but the quintessence of oxen and pigs, the elixir of partridges and capons, and all that is swallowed could be digested. I do not give up all hope, gentlemen, of obtaining such results by thinking somewhat deeper over chemistry and medicine than I have had leisure ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... 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 and best in ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... quintessence. Maybe Witwoud knows more; he stayed longer. Besides, they never mind him; ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... town consisted of such as were called upon and returned the calls of the county families. Now, alas, almost every country gentleman's house in the neighborhood is no longer occupied by its ancient proprietors, and is sold or let to successful tradespeople, so that the quintessence of society in the town plumes itself on not knowing the occupants ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... had seen his boy's great catch; he had heard the cheers, he would hear them till his dying hour. Camilla Belsize had also seen and heard, but not with the same exquisite appreciation. Cricket was a game to her, it was not that quintessence and epitome of life it would seem to be to some of its devotees; and real life was pressing so heavily upon her that the trivial consolation which had banished her companion's load could not lighten hers. So at least I thought ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... will drink a draught long as the bell rope of Notre Dame. Fill up brimmers of the quintessence of the grape, and drain them dry in honor of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... those stormy years in which, like a warrior who never knew fatigue, he fought the battles of the living God. Unquestionably, the Reformation meant liberty in conscience, intellect and citizenship, which are the quintessence of modern civilization. In those years, during which William the Silent was a prodigious force, Protestantism was troubling the waters. New religious ideas must ultimate in new political institutions, of which the Dutch Republic was a sort of first draft, and the United States of America ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the "Maximes" was the head of one of the great princely houses of France. The author of the "Caracteres" was the type of the plebeian citizen of Paris. If La Rochefoucauld offers us the quintessence of aristocracy, La Bruyere is not less a specimen of the middle class. His reputation as an honest man long suffered from his own joke about his ancestry. He wrote, "I warn everybody whom it may concern, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... warm'd with a good glass of Wine. And in the Winter, to please your appetite, a dish of Pancakes, Fritters, or a barrel of Oisters; but none of these neither will be agreeable without a delicate glass of Wine. Oh quintessence of all mirth! Who could not but wish to get such Aunts, such Cousins, & such Bridemen ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... whole Elia is the quintessence of modern essay-writing from Addison to Stevenson. There are probably no better works of the same kind in our literature. Some critics aver that there are none ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... with what unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits fought the battle of their Church, is written in every page of the annals of Europe during several generations. In the Order of Jesus was concentrated the quintessence of the Catholic spirit; and the history of the Order of Jesus is the history of the great Catholic reaction. That order possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command the public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that require so many precautions of long preliminary conversation: This has no other idea than that of itself, and can only refer to itself: this is no one special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; 'tis I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine. I may truly say lose, reserving nothing ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... wish to go to another canyon, he will simply follow the devious stream he is on to its junction with the stream of the other valley; then up the second defile. His flight is exceedingly swift. His song is a loud, clear, cheerful strain, the very quintessence of gladness as it mingles with the roar ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... heaven, you whose essence Compos'd was of man's purest quintessence, To you, to virtuous you, I dedicate This ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... wrong." The truth is, this idea of regulating life as a matter of business routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it is natural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificial process of reconstruction. One might say that it gives us the very quintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... immortality. Were the extreme claims of naturalism to be established, there would be no ground whatsoever upon which to maintain the immortality of man, mere dust returning unto dust. The philosophical concept of immortality is due to the supposition that the quintessence of the individual's nature is divine.[213:18] But several possibilities are at this point open to us. The first would maintain the survival after death of a recognizable and discrete personality. Another would suppose ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Turkish soldiers whom they had seen exercise in Mourzuk, walking in file, holding up sticks on their shoulders, and crying out "Shoulder arms!" or words to that effect. The guileless lads of Africa think these two magic words to be the quintessence of Turkish and European civilization, and that which renders the white men superior to their sable fathers. Two of the boys are dressed in old soldiers' jackets and look very droll. So we journey along ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... is a disappointing creature, after all a mere "quintessence of dust," unless he can rise above himself by relation with some superhuman being, and make his final fortune in some better region than this world. Reason requires that we love ourselves, and love our fellow-men, for ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... emanating from the same school as this is very small, but in quality they represent the highest development of Egyptian sculpture. It is fit that we should take our leave of Egyptian art with such a work as this before us, a work which gives us the quintessence of the artistic genius of ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... all the more probable, images and symbols of the cat were dedicated to the moon, the moon being universally regarded as the quintessence of everything supernatural, the very cockpit, in fact, of mystery and spookism. The nocturnal habits of the cat, its love of prowling about during moonlight hours, and the spectacle of its two round, gleaming eyes, may, of course, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... influence it in certain directions. For example, standing apart from the movement of the world, as they will do to a very large extent, the archaic, opulently done, will appeal irresistibly to very many of these irresponsible rich as the very quintessence of art. They will come to art with uncritical, cultured minds, full of past achievements, ignorant of present necessities. Art will be something added to life—something stuck on and richly reminiscent—not a manner pervading all real things. We may ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... petty annoyances, to guard her day and night, lest any rough, unlovely or unseemly thing press near her shining sphere. He desired to wrap her about with a magic mantle of beauty and luxury and the quintessence of life, to keep her in a place apart as he kept his priceless collection of rubies and emeralds. He loved her jealously, was sick at the thought that some other man might be near her when he might not, might dance with her, covet her, ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... but, having learnt from experience that the attempt to gratify any of his desires was usually checked and termed "bad," he naturally felt that a state of delight so intense as that to which he had at last attained, must necessarily be the very quintessence of iniquity. Being resolved to go through with it at all hazards, he felt proportionately wild and reckless. Such a state of commotion was there in his heaving bosom, owing to contradictory and conflicting ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... times, and pessimistic, his talk was intellectually stimulating. His strong convictions, even his inveterate prejudices, prevented his irony from degenerating into cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable biographies, and it was always the human side of history that appealed to Froude. He once playfully compared himself with the Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor's chair. But in truth he saw always behind historical ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... glory of our isle, Thou far, far more than mortal man, whose style Struck more men dumb to hearken to thy song Than Orpheus' harp, or Tully's golden tongue. To him, as right, for wit's deep quintessence, For honor, valor, virtue, excellence, Be all the garlands, crown his tomb with bay, Who spake as much as e'er our tongue can say. Britannia's Pastorals, Bk. II. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... long as human beings are capable of being touched by a sincere revelation of emotion combined with a perfection of utterance which seems fairly Divine. This delicate treatment and this exquisite finish are two prominent characteristics of Mozart's style. Truly the Symphony is the quintessence of Mozart in terms of sound and rhythm, and we need but to listen to his message and receive it with grateful appreciation. The work contains the four customary movements, all of them (save the three-part Minuet and Trio) in complete Sonata-form. The first movement begins at once with a gracefully ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... childhood. When you ask us to take the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I really couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able to point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not of a rational fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the quintessence of cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God." Dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are half-witted, sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because they are realists as to money and unimaginative ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... which spirits are caught and fastened upon the pages. Books are storehouses into which facts and principles have been harvested. Just as a bit of coal tells us what ferns and flowers grew in the far-off era, so the book gives us the very quintessence of man's thoughts about life and duty and death. Nor is there any other way of gaining these vital knowledges. Life is too short to obtain them through conversation or travel. Nor is any youth ready for his task until he has traced the rise and growth of houses, tools, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... poorer Person. Hence may appear the Hardship that many are under of being necessitated to drink of those Brewers Malt Liquors, who out of avarice boil their Hops to the last, that they may not lose any of their quintessence: Nay, I have known some of the little Victualling Brewers so stupendiously ignorant, that they have thought they acted the good Husband, when they have squeezed the Hops after they have been boiled to the last in small Beer, to get out all their goodness as they vainly ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... which their entangled feet often stumbled on sultry nights, were fingers, tapered by tomb life, that sprang up from the earth to detain them and cast them into each other's arms. That pungent and penetrating odour exhaled by the broken stems was the fertilising perfume, the mighty quintessence of life which is slowly elaborated in the grave, and intoxicates the lovers who wander in the solitude of the paths. The dead, the old departed dead, longed for the bridal of ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Ferice, as it is generally lacking in the minds of true patriots. Great reforms and great revolutions are generally brought about by people of fierce and desperate convictions, like yours, who go to extreme lengths, and never know when to stop. The quintessence of an artist's talent is precisely that faculty of comparison, that gift of knowing when the thing he is doing corresponds as nearly as he can make it with the thing he ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults, and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers, and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... helpless victim to his fascination. Accompanying her grandmother was Mademoiselle Stephanie Coquereau, the Mayor's niece (a wealthy orphan, as Aristide soon learned), nineteen, pretty, demure, perfectly brought up, who said "Oui, Monsieur" and "Non, Monsieur" with that quintessence of modest grace which only a ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Robin, reviewing Sydney Smith in the Revue des Deux Mondes, wrote as follows:—"Cache sous le pseudonyme de Peter Plymley il adresse ces nouvelles provinciales a un reverend pasteur, qui est bien le parfait modele de la sottise protestante, la quintessence des docteurs Bowles ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... love, have been burning down a large new building erected for purposes of free discussion, because Abolition meetings were being held in it; and the Southern steamer has been wrecked with dreadful loss of life, owing to the exceeding small esteem in which its officers appear to have held that "quintessence of dust, Man." The vessel was laden with Southerners, coming north for the summer; and I suppose there is scarcely a family from Virginia to Florida, that is not in some way touched by this dreadful and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... lounge in her parlors, drive her to the park, take her to the operas, concerts and plays, and compliment her good looks, which are wonderfully well preserved for a woman of forty-five. I am twenty-six, you know, and so no one ever associates us together in any kind of gossip. She is the very quintessence of fashion, and I am one of the danglers whose own light is made brighter by the reflection of her rays. Do you see the point? Well, then, in return for my attentions, she takes a very sisterly interest in my future wife, and has adroitly ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... and to the God of truth. Let all men, therefore, that would please God make conscience of believing; on pain, I say, of displeasing him; on pain of being, with Cain, rejected, and on pain of being damned in hell. 'He that believeth not shall be damned' (Mark 16:16). Faith is the very quintessence of all gospel obedience, it being that which must go before other duties, and that which also must accompany whatever I do in the worship of God, if it be accepted of him.[35] Here you may see a reason why the force ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... white-headed man dropped his eyes for once; and for once the thin, hard lines of his mouth relaxed in a smile that seemed to epitomize all the evil that was in his face, and to give it forth in one sudden sour quintessence. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Yeager must have been in her very early twenties, but her pretty face, finely modeled, had the provocative effrontery that is the note of twentieth-century young womanhood. Its audacity, which was the quintessence of worldliness, held an ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... All that I have to live I'd gladly change For one such month as I have wasted here— To draw long dreams of beauty, love, and power, From founts of hope that never will outrun, And drink all life's quintessence in an hour, Give me the days when ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but at all events they were saved later on from the delusion that nobody but Nietzsche had ever challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first heard the name of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss Borchardt, who had read my Quintessence of Ibsenism, and told me that she saw what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut and Bose. Which I protest I had never seen, and could not have read with any comfort, for want of the necessary German, if ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... be light,' said God, and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep, and from her native east To journey through the airy gloom began, Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun Was not: she in a cloudy tabernacle Sojourned the while. God saw the light was good, And light from darkness ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... of the curriculum which it would be so difficult to commend to an uninterested pupil by an appeal to simple utilitarian motives. On the other hand there clings to literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared with football or hockey. If the attitude of the teacher reflects the old question ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... manner, had no strong personal predilections on the question of the election of sheriffs and surrogates, and if, on a fair and deliberate examination, it should be thought better to have these officials elected by the people, they would cheerfully acquiesce in that decision. This was the quintessence of diplomacy. He knew that Erastus Root and Samuel Young insisted upon having these officers elected, and, to secure their opposition to the election of justices of the peace, he indicated a willingness to ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... are ignorant of their causation—is as wholly unknown to the historian of scientific ideas as it was to biological specialists before 1858. But that suggestion is the central idea of the 'Origin of Species,' and contains the quintessence ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... aesthetes, like Rosetti and his school, must contemplate with admiring despair, he makes vehicles of the most serious moral and spiritual teaching. 'The Vision of Sin' is worth a hundred sermons on the disastrous effects of unbridled profligacy. In 'The Palace of Art' we have the quintessence of 'The Book of Ecclesiastes' and much more besides. Even in 'The Lotos Eaters' we have the mirror held up to Hedonism. On the education of the affections and on the purity of domestic life must depend very largely, not merely the happiness of individuals, ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... extraordinary.' Mme. D'Artlay's Diary, ii. 400. 'Dr. Johnson's history,' wrote Horace Walpole, on June 20, 1785, 'though he is going to have as many lives as a cat, might be reduced to four lines; but I shall wait to extract the quintessence till Sir John Hawkins, Madame Piozzi, and Mr. Boswell have produced their quartos.' Horace Walpole's Letters, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the quintessence of all dolls. For her she could embroider, ruffle, and tuck; search the city over for the daintiest of baby shoes and the showiest of infant hats. Althea should have a nurse, and a carriage, and a poodle dog. Santa Claus ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... summer's evening. When it pleased the Blessed Master that I should suffer reproach and vilification for my testimony, then it was that the river of joy which flows from the Throne flowed through my heart as never before. It was a new experience—a quintessence of joy. The shouts of burning martyrs were no longer a mystery. I stagger no more at the account of the saints who took joyfully the spoiling of their goods. My soul is bathed in an ocean of balm ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... development. It can be no other way, he says, since the blood is the source of nourishment and the liver is necessary for formation of the blood. Furthermore, he contends, "the seed is no part of the ... aliment of the body ... the seed is the quintessence of the blood."[13] Ross is an epigeneticist, to be sure, but so was Aristotle, and Ross prefers to maintain the supremacy of logic and the concepts of the Aristotelian tradition as a guide to ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... very quintessence of perception,—the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... hell of Dante and the medieval theologians contained nine separate circles. On Menga's lips, however, from the fifth hell means no more than 'from a very remote region,' 'from the North Pole.' Cf. la quinta esencia, 'quintessence.' ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... question I may call attention to the fact that the germs of civilization were first planted in China by people strongly imbued with the belief that the pearl was the quintessence of life-giving and prosperity-conferring powers:[169] it was not only identified with the moon, but also was itself a particle of moon-substance which fell as dew into the gaping oyster. It was the very people who held such views about pearls and gold who, when searching for alluvial gold and fresh-water ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... will be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is different in the measure of every man's individuality, and the intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation between man and man, and a man may no more reach God through a priest than love his wife through a priest. But just as a man in love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow expression ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... teacher of composition, however, and with much class-room practice, it undoubtedly would get rhetoric taught more effectively than would more philosophical or literary treatises. Thus in Guarino's school at Ferrara (1429-1460) the Ad Herennium was regarded as the quintessence of pure Ciceronian doctrine of oratory, and was made the starting point and standing authority in teaching rhetoric. In more advanced classes it was supplemented by the De oratore, Orator, and what was known of Quintilian.[157] The Ciceronianus of Erasmus testifies ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... So much by much as doth Zenocrate. What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then? If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still [267] From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty, to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of distilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are, or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the Cenci, he might urge that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually to be found in the world ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... this Oxford pundit, this double-distilled quintessence of university perfection, this writer of religious treatises, this speaker of ecclesiastical speeches, had been like a little child in her hands; she had turned him inside out and read his very heart as she might have done that of a young girl. She could ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... he was quite willing it should bear any meaning the words would fairly bear; to the best of his recollection his meaning when he wrote it was "the hate of the quality hate, &c.," but he thought the meaning of "the quintessence of hatred" finer. He said there had never been a poem so misunderstood by the "ninnies ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... useless detail to one broad and simple effect. Youth, eager, strong, self-confident, with its innocent parted lips, and its steadfast eyes looking out over the future—the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the embodiment, of a whole generation. So might the young Odysseus have looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus. And with such an air had hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as thou first didst know her, A loveliness to tempt or saint or devil, The rare quintessence of pure womanhood! Transparent brightness! A living crystal globe, Wherein all beauties of humanity Reflect themselves with iridescent glow! Dost thou remember? Behold her now the ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this peculiar quality of colour." Bernard Berenson goes further. For him the entire picture, Venus Rising From the Sea, presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and movement... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life communicating movement, is always there. And writing of the Pallas in the Pitti he most eloquently said: "As to the hair—imagine ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... fortunate cook who inhales them. An evident proof that these exhalations[96-*] possess the most restorative qualities is, that THE COOK, who is in general the least eater, is, as generally, the fattest person in the family, from continually being surrounded by the quintessence of all the food she dresses; whereof she sends to HER MASTER only the fibres and calcinations, who is consequently thin, gouty, and the victim of diseases ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter—and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me! Will you take back my gratitude for it?—agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... her past an open bathroom door whose garment-littered floor showed indeed that the laundry hadn't been sent out for some time, into another room that was, so to speak, the quintessence of pinkness. This ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... per se" is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit." Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a destructive ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... excitement and enthusiasm as the hideous effects of their discovery became apparent. Be sure an iron cross quickly hung over the iron heart that conceived and developed this filthy arm; for does it not offer the essence—quintessence of all "frightfulness?" Does it not challenge every human nerve-centre by its horror? Does it not, once proclaimed, by anticipation awake those very emotions of dread and dismay that make the stroke ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... began the story again. At the end of an hour she discovered that she had dressed up Trennahan in velvet and gold, doublet and hose. She laughed with grim merriment. Ignorant as she was, she was quick to see the incongruity between modern man in his quintessence and the romantic garments of a buried century. Also, her hero had addressed his startled friends ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... these maxims rare, You who hope to win the fair; Who are, or would esteemed be, The quintessence ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... give it to the poor? We do not here impugn the motives of judges. Generally speaking, they are honest; but the whole system of court procedure is hampered by detailed statutes and technical rules, that mean an amount of cost and delay which in itself is the very quintessence of injustice. A citizen is offered a choice between submitting to the wrong inflicted by a fellow-citizen and accepting the wrong inflicted by a dilatory and crushingly costly legal procedure. We probably excel some nations in the rightfulness of the decisions we can get ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... it," retorted Craig with a laugh which Grant thought the quintessence of impertinence. "You never dreamed she'd fall ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... concerned. The years that are most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in France, not among English residents, but among that which is the quintessence of the nation, not an indifferent spectator, but an enthusiast, striving heart and soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake himself free from race and language and to recreate himself ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... course of his peregrinations. This new "Review, Newspaper, and Annual Register," was largely patronized; for who would not give fourpence every eighth day, to be furnished, by so competent a man as Mr. Coleridge, with this quintessence, this concentration of all that was valuable, in Politics, Criticism, and Literature; enriched in addition, with Poetry of the first waters, luminous Essays, and other effusions of men of letters? So choice a morceau was the very ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... with impatience. She even struck her mother with awe by the grandeur of her ideas and the depth of her theories. Nor let it be supposed that she rushed away at once to the consideration of the great fabric which was to be the ultimate sign and mark of her status, the quintessence of her briding, the outer veil, as it were, of the tabernacle—namely, her wedding-dress. As a great poet works himself up by degrees to that inspiration which is necessary for the grand turning-point of his epic, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... milk, and brisk as bottled beer, Wholesome as mutton, and as water clear, In wildflowers fertile, as thy fields of corn, And frolicksome as lambs, or sheep new shorn. I ask not ortolans, or Chian wine, The fat of rams, or quintessence of swine. Her spicy stores let either India keep, Nor El Dorado vend her golden sheep. And to the mansion house, or council hall, Still on her black splay feet may the huge tortoise crawl. Not Parson's butt my appetite can move, Nor, Bell, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... universal as perceived by us in love, beauty, and delight. Though the destiny of the personal self be obscure, these things cannot fail. The conclusion of the "Sensitive Plant" might be cited as conveying the quintessence of his hope upon this most ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Synod of Trent, the older it grows, shall flourish the more, day by day, and year by year. Good God! what variety of nations, what a choice assembly of Bishops of the whole world, what a splendid representation of Kings and Commonwealths, what a quintessence of theologians, what sanctity, what tears, what fears, what flowers of Universities, what tongues, what subtlety, what labour, what infinite reading, what wealth of virtues and of studies filled that august sanctuary! I have myself heard Bishops, eminent and prudent men,—and ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... had once been a celebrity, though no-one remembered for what. Miss Myra Mooney, formerly a beauty, had known her days of success. She had been the supreme performer of ladylike parts. She had been known as the very quintessence of refinement. It was assumed when she first came out that a duke would go to the devil for her in her youth, and that in her late maturity she would tour the provinces with The Three Musketeers. Neither of these prophecies had, however, been fulfilled. She still occasionally took small ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... every mathematician and engineer should read them. They are, if I may say so, a "mathematical biology"—the survey of a life long study of "tropisms," which is the name given to express "forced movements" in organisms. They give the quintessence of laboratory experiments as to what are the effects of different energies such as light (heliotropism), electricity (galvanotropism), gravity (geotropism), etc., in their reaction and influence upon the movements and actions of living organisms. These ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... that if merit's exalted 'Tis excellent sport to decry it, And trail its good name in the gutter; And that cynics, white-gloved and cravatted, Are the cream and quintessence of all things, Ass ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... of the human heart, whose enmity was directed straight against the perfect revelation of the love of God in Christ. There the sin of man reached its climax and did its worst. What was done there against Christ, and against God in Him, was a kind of embodiment and quintessence of the sin of the whole world. And undoubtedly it was this which was pressing on Jesus; this was "the travail of His soul." He was looking close at sin's utmost hideousness; He was sickened with its contact; He was crushed with its brutality—crushed to death. Yet this human nature was His ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... character of the heroine, which is symbolized by the title, is subjected to a more profound psychological diagnosis; but we are still taken with the same purity of heart as in the earlier narratives, and the quintessence of this book, as indeed of the entire literary personality of the authoress, may be found in the final words of the Tales of the Councillor's Girls: "The kind, the imperturbable, who with gentle readiness take good or evil as it comes—they ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... world lying in wickedness, in the innermost heart of the nation. It is a wonderful testimony to a man that he should have thus been able to imprint his own characteristics upon his race: and no doubt it is because he was himself of the very quintessence of its national character to start with, that he has maintained this prodigious power through ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... if Smith wished to express the very quintessence of brutality and meanness, he would refer to the death ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... taking his pipe out of his mouth. "You shut up, Jim. As I said, Bill Barker was the quintessence of a drover. He'd been at the game ever since he was a nipper. He run away from home when he was fourteen and went up into Queensland. He's been all over Queensland and New South Wales and most of South Australia, and a good deal of the Western, too: over the great stock ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... Morals and the instructions in Oratory, which were found among the writings of Cato, may be regarded as the Roman quintessence or, if the expression be preferred, the Roman -caput mortuum- of Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The immediate sources whence Cato drew were, in the case of the poem on Morals, presumably the Pythagorean writings ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the brisk aphorisms in the note-book seemed to him the quintessence of criticism. Maury, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two, yet in the actual stuff of their intelligences they were not, it seemed, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 her hand and looked down into ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the precious quintessence of the New England type, invaluable for his stimulating and ennobling strain; but his genius is too astral, too select, too remote, to incarnate and give voice to the national spirit. Clothe him with flesh and blood, make his daring affirmations real and vital in a human personality ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... most preposterously ugly; her figure was large and masculine; her hair red; and her face very deeply indented with the small pox. As a man, she would have been considered the essence of vulgarity; as a woman she was the quintessence: so much so, that she had arrived at the age of thirty-six without having, notwithstanding her property, received any attentions which could be construed into an offer. As we always seek most eagerly that which we find most difficult to obtain, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat |
