"Quintessence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hegel 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 ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... as your institutions are founded on reason and nature, judge," I continued, "that you would be more disposed ta cultivate this member than to mutilate it; and this the more especially, as I understand all monikins believe it to be the very quintessence ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of the things that makes up the law of compensation. The law of compensation itself is the quintessence of ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... 101 of whose propositions were formally condemned by Pope Clement XI in his famous Constitution "Unigenitus."(225) The Jansenistic teachings of the Council of Pistoia were censured by Pius VI, A. D. 1794, in his Bull "Auctorem fidei." The quintessence of this heretical system is embodied in the proposition that whatever a man does in the state of mortal sin is necessarily sinful for the reason that he is not in the state of grace (status caritatis). Baius(226) ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... before her and kissed her dress and her hands. "I love you boundlessly," he said with panting breath; "you are to me the quintessence of all happiness, virtue, and beauty. I shall love you to the last hour ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... their persons,—some having three heads, and some four tusks, and some four mouths, and some four arms,—the Danavas met with destruction. And, then, O Bharata, in a moment I slew all those Danavas, with other swarms of arrows composed of the quintessence of stone, flaming like fire or the sun, and possessed of the force of the thunder-bolt. And, seeing them hewn by the Gandiva, and deprived of life, and thrown from the sky, I again bowed unto that god—the Destroyer of Tripura. And, seeing those adorned ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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
... poach eggs, we may safely conclude, that these gentlemen understood nothing of cookery. In like manner it may be concluded, that you, James Boswell, and I Andrew Erskine, cannot write serious epistles. This, as Mr. Tristram[19] says, I deny; for this letter of mine shall contain the quintessence of solidity; it shall be a piece of boiled beef and cabbage, a roasted goose, and a boiled leg of pork and greens: in one word, it shall contain advice; sage and mature advice. Oh! James Boswell! take care and don't break your neck; pray don't ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, 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 the academies. Wherever ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... controversy. It is on all sides agreed, that St. Paul no less than three times exhorts every man to continue in the condition in which Providence has placed him. "And this rule," says he, "ordain I in all the churches." Yet—would any man believe it possible?—the very quintessence of abolitionism itself has been extracted from this passage of his writings! Let us consider for a moment the wonderful alchemy by which this ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... sparkling sky, the glow beyond the worlds, the listening isles—demure and dim—the air moist, pacific and fragrant—what concern of mine if the smoky messenger from the stuffy town never comes? This is the quintessence of life. I am alive at last. Such keen tingling, thrilling perceptions were never mine before. Now do I realise the magnificent, the prodigious fact of being. Mine not only a part in the homely world, but a fellowship with ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the "Star" gradually sinking under me near the Malouine Islands, the sixty-eighth degree of latitude kept me a prisoner in its sea of ice at the South Pole; I passed two consecutive days and nights on board the Esmerelda, between fire and inundation; and if I were to extract the quintessence of the agonies experienced upon these three occasions it could never equal the intense torture I suffer at the Poste-Restante. Three seals broken, three letters opened, three overwhelming disappointments! Nothing! nothing! nothing! Oh miserable synonym of despair! Oh cruel type of death! Why do ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... the adventure of Blanche and her page had not been carried beyond the castle, it was related throughout Touraine that Messire Bruyn had still found himself sufficiently in funds to afford a child. Intact remained the virtue of Blanche, and by the quintessence of instruction drawn by her from the natural reservoir of women, she recognised how necessary it was to be silent concerning the venial sin with which her child was covered. So she became modest and good, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs. Mountstuart appeared through his farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn at the end of the lawn, with Horace De Craye smirking beside her. And the woman's vaunted penetration was unable to detect the histrionic Irishism of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the least what she seemed. She had a great deal of what is more pleasing than mere appearance, and that is character. She was ambitious and energetic. She did tatting when she did nothing else—said it concealed her lack of repose and liability to fidget. She was able to draw la quintessence de tout: she could make a mountain-spring of a mole-hill. She also had a touch of temper: those who are perfectly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... the importance, are of an impalpable kind. I doubt if there is any subject 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 ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... real convention of any democracy that ever drew breath. The first act of that memorable revolution was to proclaim a state of peace with an appeal not to the kings, not to the rulers, but an appeal to the people of all nations. They are the very breath of democracy; the quintessence of freedom. They made their appeal to the people of all nations, the Allies as well as the Central Powers, to send representatives to lay down terms of a peace that should be lasting. Here was a fine opportunity to strike ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... will not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a liber veritatis, a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men. All writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a human should instead of to the terrible is. And I say this to you, because ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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
... 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 thing that every body wanted; ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... guests," the colored men present, quickly embraced the opportunity, utilizing for a platform a dry goods box, upon which I was placed to give the Negro version of this climax of inconsistency and quintessence of hypocrisy. This was the unexpected. All the people, both native and foreign, had been invited and special places provided for all except the Negro, and on the native platform he was not allowed space. The novelty ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... have solved the problem: 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 ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... quintessence of luxury, so much so that he who has once enjoyed them will long to turn lotos-eater, forget the painful and laborious past, and live and die at "Miles' Hotel." Oh, Madeira! gem of the ocean, land of pine-clad mountains ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... nevertheless as 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 boiler or gridiron should ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... the feeling has always been mutual. For those "monstrous" beings are a highly intelligent and extremely sensitive race, and our—to us—trim and graceful human forms seems to them the very quintessence of malformation and hideousness. ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... approved, and more sugar if necessary. Let it be well corked, and it will keep.—Lemonade may be prepared in a minute, by pounding a quarter of an ounce of citric or crystalised lemon acid, with a few drops of quintessence of lemon peel, and mixing it by degrees with a pint ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... in that matter the very quintessence of woman. Even I, who have known her for years, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... 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 and best in the poem, often seems divided from it ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... soul is 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, for because of purgation we are born innocent life after life. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... seated beside 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 alert ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... "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, in order that the world may be prepared and nobody be ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... sanctum. Yet, though he accepted us at our face value, and began to talk of his strange discoveries there was none of the old familiar prating about matrix and flux, elixir, magisterium, magnum opus, the mastery and the quintessence, those alternate names for the philosopher's stone which Paracelsus, Simon Forman, Jerome Cardan, and the other medieval worthies indulged in. This experience at least was as up-to-date as the Curies, Becquerel, Ramsay, and ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... Snarle has been dead six months, and it is not pleasant to contemplate a name without an owner—it is not to every one, but Mr. Flint likes to read the sign, and think that Snarle is dead. He was the reverse of Flint, and that his name should have been Snarle at all is odd, for in life he was the quintessence of quietness, and the oil of good nature. But Flint is well named; he is chalcedony at heart. Nobody says this, but everybody knows it. Nell, the pretty match-girl, who sells her wares in Wall-street, never approaches ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... stoutest defenders of this book was Lord Houghton, who, in writing to me with regard to it, mentioned a curious incident. The villain of the piece, Colonel Stapleton, was drawn by me from a certain Lord ——, as to whom I had said to myself the first moment I met him: "This man is the quintessence of selfishness. He is capable of anything that would minister to his own pleasures." "The novel," said Lord Houghton in his letter, "requires no apology. You have made only one mistake in it. The conduct of the colonel in one way would have differed from that which you ascribe to him. For ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... in fairy stories, we should prepare ourselves to see Hetty pass through a season in drudgery and hardship, with the ultimate quintessence of joy as the reward for her trials and tribulations. Happily, this is not a fairy tale. There are some things more fantastic than fairy tales, if they are not spoiled in the telling. Hetty did not go forth to encounter drudgery, ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... the correspondence of heroes and heroines. Verily is there a distinction between letters written by lovers and love letters. The former may be deeply interesting to uninterested readers, while the latter are the very quintessence of egotistical selfishness; for, indeed, lovers may sometimes write about other matters besides love, as, for example, in the famous epistles of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... particularly those of the shrill-voiced and nagging or whining variety, the 'better halves' of Weller, Varden, Snagsby and Joe Gargery, not to speak of the Miggs, the Gummidge, and the M'Stinger. Like Mr. Swinburne and other true men, he regards Mrs. Gamp as representing the quintessence of literary art wielded by genius. Try (he urges with a fine curiosity) 'to imagine Sarah Gamp as a young girl'! But it is unfair to separate a phrase from a context in which every syllable is precious, reasonable, thrice distilled and sweet to the ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... while I admire That I can be neither your husband nor sire. Your husband's, your 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you in the face; hailing from East, West, North and South are banners; held aloft by unseen hands, bearing on them—the quintessence ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... my eyes, who ought to have been sent out of the way at once of all companions capable of abandon and enjoyment; and, as to the "father" she quoted from, I could imagine him as the embodiment of asinine wisdom, so to speak—the quintessence of the practical, which so often, I observe, inclines its ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... 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 ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to laughing at Michaelis, who was shivering at Aix, preaching in a desert while all the world was gone to hear strange things at Sainte-Baume. "Michaelis, you preach away, indeed, but you get no further forward; while Louisa has reached, has caught hold of the quintessence ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... 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 Pall Mall ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... 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 arising ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... and beneficial use of the national domain. Neither could he agree with Eastern statesmen who deplored the gratuitous distribution of lands, which by sale would yield large revenues. His often-repeated reply was the quintessence of Western statesmanship. The pioneer who went into the wilderness, to wrestle with all manner of hardships, was a true wealth-producer. As he cleared his land and tilled the soil, he not only himself became a tax-payer, but he increased the value of adjoining lands ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... protectingly, longed to shield her by his own might from all griefs, troubles and 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, kiss her. He hated all men because of ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... leurs successeurs que son cote moral a envisager, et c'est le parti que prit Rousseau. The general sentiment of the ode is handled with great dignity in Paradise Regained. Bk. III. l. 43—157—a passage which, as Thyer says, contains the quintessence of the subject. Dante has some noble lines on Fortune in the viith canto of the Inferno,—lines worthy of a great mystic poet. After referring to the vain complaints and maledictions of men against this ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and design and forethought into the industrial welter being 'contrary to the laws of political economy'" He would have seen, then, as one of the pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven [Footnote: The Quintessence of Ibsenism] that, of the kind of human purpose and design and forethought to be found in a government like that of Queen Victoria's uncles, the less the better. He would have seen, not the strong doing the weak down, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... 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 and power of hell is so bent against believing. Satan hateth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... more plainly and forcibly than in their own prose. The reader will observe that of the whole twenty-three only two appear to have any knowledge on the subject, the famous A. R. Wallace and the brilliant Dr. Coues. The following is the essence or rather quintessence of the voluminous responses in the order in which they were published. The learned gentlemen ought to feel grateful for the increased candor, brevity and explicitness of their replies, when boiled down into the rhyming form, bringing out ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... Mount Ts'u-o. Air and variegated clouds were the sole nourishment of her vital spirits. An hermaphrodite, at once both the active and the passive principle, she daily scaled the highest peak of the mountain to gather there the flowery quintessence of the sun and the moon. P'an Ku, captivated by her virgin purity, took advantage of a moment when she was breathing to enter her mouth in the form of a ray of light. She was enceinte for twelve years, at the end of which period the fruit of her womb came out through her spinal column. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... laugh at all things. That at least is the value he now has for us. He is the portrait of perpetual irony, the spirit of the golden Sixteenth Century which delicately laughed at the whole world of thoughts and things, the quintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit of Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalised by truthfullest art. With the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still laughed; and when the voice of conscience sounding through ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... case is solved at the end, however. But even at the end of a ghost story, the underlying mystery remains. In the ghost story, we have the very quintessence of mystery. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... books are of such importance that 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 ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... But it is, I think, not unfair to say that the German and Flemish versions, from the latter of which Caxton's and all later English forms seem to be copied, are, if better adjusted to a continuous story, less saturated with the quintessence of satiric criticism of life than the French Renart. The fault of excessive coarseness of thought and expression, which has been commented on in the fabliaux, recurs here to the fullest extent; but it is atoned for and sweetened by an even greater ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 universe are round; ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 provincial French Convent ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... his reasons for dissenting from them. His collections in time became voluminous, but he then exercised that judgment which the formers of such collections are usually deficient in. With Hesiod he knew that "half is better than the whole," and it was his aim to express the quintessence of his reading, but not to give it in a crude state to the world, and when his treatises were sent to the press, they were not half the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... a revelation of what a good cook can do with vegetables in season; it was the quintessence of delicacy, the refinement of finesse, the veritable apotheosis of the kitchen garden; meat would have been brutal, the intrusion of a chop inexcusable, the assertion of a steak barbarous, even a terrapin would have felt quite out of place amidst things so fragrant ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... their diet, diving into the fat capons, drinking your rich wines, feeding on larks, sparrows, potato-pies, and such good unctuous meats, how their wits are refined and rarified; and sometimes a very quintessence of conceit flows from them, able to drown a ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... abroad; never mind which or where; have experienced many Inns and many outings, but find all Grand Hotels much the same. "Lawn-tennis, English Church in the Spatious Grounds, good station for friends of the Fisch-Sport."—But the quintessence of Grand-Hotelism is "Mr." in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... absolute and indestructible existence of the 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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 be convinced ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... her own heart in secret; and in time a dreadful thing came to happen—the stagnant soul beginning to fester. One day the girl, whose heart was the quintessence of all innocence, happened to see a low word scribbled upon a fence. And now—they had urged her to discover sins, and she discovered them. Suppose that word were to stay in her mind and haunt her—suppose that ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... 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 I ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... female Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughly feminini generis—? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!—The need of salvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Second, abstract minds, "quintessence abstractors," with whom the internal life is dominant in the form of combinations of concepts. They have a schematic representation of the world, reduced to a hierarchy of general ideas, noted by ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... dropped out of the picture, or rather it became merged for Finn in the picture he beheld of the Lady Desdemona; a study in tawny orange-gold and jetty black, gleaming where the sun touched her and embodying the quintessence of canine ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... worth five thousand pound; Swears he could get her in an hour, If gaffer Harry would endow her; And sell, to pacify his wrath, A birth-right for a mess of broth. Young Harry, as all Europe knows, Was long the quintessence of beaux; But, when espoused, he ran the fate That must attend the married state; From gold brocade and shining armour, Was metamorphosed to a farmer; His grazier's coat with dirt besmear'd; Nor twice a-week will shave his beard. Old Robin, all his youth a sloven, At fifty-two, when he ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Utopias and Utopias. The great Utopians of the first half of our century were men of genius; they helped forward social science, which in their time was still entirely Utopian. The Utopians of to-day, the Anarchists, are the abstracters of quintessence, who can only fully draw forth some poor conclusions from certain mummified principles. They have nothing to do with social science, which, in its onward march, has distanced them by at least half a century. Their "profound thinkers," their "lofty theorists," do not even ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... in modern poetry is there a superber union of the scientific and the poetic vision than in this magnificent passage—the quintessence of the poet's conception of the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... was unique and different from all others. It seemed to me that the difference between him and other writers was one of quality rather than of quantity. I felt that, as a man, Shakespeare was of a different kind of humanity; but I do not think so now. Shakespeare is no more the quintessence of the world's literature than Plato and Kant are the quintessence of universal philosophy. I once admired the philosophy and characters of the author of Hamlet; when I read him today, what most impresses me is his rhetoric, and, above all, his ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... of the great epochs of the world, one of the turning points of human existence. It covered so large a field and was so many-sided that only careful study can give a full realization of the giants of intellect and power who made its greatness, and who left behind them work that shows the very quintessence of genius. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... Verily, 'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,' appears to him no better 'than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.' Quite in accordance with such tenets which we need not qualify by name, Man, to him, is but a 'quintessence of dust.' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... she admitted. "But to be among them, controlling them, directing them, two hundred of them, and to escape being eaten by them—that, at least, if it isn't romantic, is certainly the quintessence of adventure. And adventure and romance ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... mind these maxims rare, You who hope to win the fair; Who are, or would esteemed be, The quintessence of gallantry. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... chiefly by the Americans present. There were Republicans by birth and nature, destitute of traditions of loyalty or reverence for aught on earth; who bore on their faces not only republicanism, but that quintessence of puritan republicanism which hails from New England; and these were subjects of a foreign king, nay, several of them office-holders who had taken the oath of allegiance, and from whose lips "His Majesty, Your ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... spring: the bustle of August was renewed on all the mountain roads, and, in the meanwhile, Squire Headlong and his little fat butler carried most energetically into effect the lessons of the savant in the Court of Quintessence, qui par engin mirificque jectoit ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... understand you leaving your husband and wishing to live alone —natural enough!—but what I cannot understand is that you, the quintessence of delicate breeding, should walk the streets at night and sit in dives. I wonder you can stand being in the room with such women, to ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... ever depict him knut in hand,—almost fraternises with the Asiatics, and in any case treats them with due consideration as if they had a right to live, at least in their own country. Hence his undoubted popularity. But we, the quintessence of Christianity and charity towards our neighbours, habitually treat natives with much needless harshness and reserve, which far from impressing the natives with our dignity—as we think—renders us ridiculous in their eyes. A number of younger Englishmen are beginning to be alive to ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... all types of "bals" in Paris. Over in Montmartre, on the Place Blanche, is the well-known "Moulin Rouge," a place suggestive, to those who have never seen it, of the quintessence of Parisian devil-me-care gaiety. You expect it to be like those clever pen-and-ink drawings of Grevin's, of the old Jardin Mabille in its palmiest days, brilliant with lights and beautiful women extravagantly gowned and bejeweled. You expect to see Frenchmen, too, in pot-hats, crowding in ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... Loveliness was the quintessence of her. With his innate feeling for words, he had never—even accidentally—applied it to Rose. Had she, too, felt impatient? Was she coming over to breakfast ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... passages from Duveyrier, makes the following comment: "Such customs as these indicate delicate instincts, which are absolutely foreign to the Arabs. They strongly remind us of the times of our southern troubadours and of the cours d'amour, which were the quintessence of chivalry."[104] ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... pebbly rills; Piles the dry cedar round her silver urn, 480 (Bright climbs the blaze, the crackling faggots burn), Culls the green herb of China's envy'd bowers, In gaudy cups the steamy treasure pours; And, sweetly-smiling, on her bended knee Presents the fragrant quintessence of Tea. ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... discomfort is provided by the type of master who lectures on a subject for half an hour, and then, with a bland smile, invites, or rather challenges, his form to write a 'good, long note' on the quintessence of his discourse. For the inexperienced this is an awful moment. They must write something—but what? For the last half hour they have been trying to impress the master with the fact that they belong to the class of people who can ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... love-songs 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.
... Peaches prepared for you; which cold Fruits must then be 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 and ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... our nomenclature, How our names differ from our nature, 'Tis easy to discern: "Here lies the quintessence of wit, For mirth and humour none so fit, And yet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... itself in the Systeme de la Nature as a positive substitute for his lost faith, he found only that which filled his poet's soul with horror. 'It appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore there was no God. Why not a necessity for a God to take its place among the other necessities!' On the other hand, the ordinary teleological theology, with its external architect of the world and its externally determined ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... 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, governments, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly intellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence. The fine and delicate spirit of the Italians existed in quintessence among the Florentines. And of this superiority not only they, but the inhabitants also of Rome and Lombardy and Naples were conscious.... The primacy of the Florentines in literature, the fine arts, law, scholarship, philosophy, and science was ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... than what all of us must be counted, worms of five feet long, mortal angels, the world's epitome, heaps of atoms which Nature has kneaded with blood into solid flesh, little worlds of living clay, sparks of heaven, inches of earth, Nature's quintessence, moving dust, the little all, smooth-faced cherubim, in whose souls the Ring of stars has drawn the image ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... taste: The quintessence of this fivefold test. Just cuddle a crumb with your tongue and if it tickles the taste buds it's prime. When it melts in your mouth, that's proof it will melt ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... gentlewoman! And then came to her mind those curious questions; what makes a gentleman? what makes a gentlewoman? What is the inner reality, the spiritualised quintessence of that privilege in the world which men call rank, which forces the thousands and hundreds of thousands to bow down before the few elect? What gives, or can give ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... EASTON has not a majority mind, that she sees the sad thing more easily than the gay, that I like her work best in her more objective moods, and that, like so many writers of perception, she finds the quintessence of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... worth. But, it should be added, that such anecdotes are not told in the circumlocutory style of gossip, nor nipt in the bud by undeveloped brevity. We have Selden's pennyworth of spirit without the glass of water: the quintessence of condensation, which, we are told, is the result of time and experience, which rejects what is no longer essential. Here circumspection was necessary, and it has been well exercised. The anecdotes are not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... art—and we may say, with some confidence, that it will 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. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... very quintessence of jealousy; he keeps no male creature in his house; and from abroad he lets no man come ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the average. And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to produce a permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist not only in breeding the desirable but in either killing the undesirable, or at least—what is the quintessence, the inner reality of death—in preventing ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... 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 Miette ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it would be neighbourly Charity to give them away to the 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 ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... theory 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, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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
... procurable, to an ostrich; then, the mass having been properly stewed, the superincumbent envelopes are all thrown away, and the essences of the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery, however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as his artistic power. Thus, if we may take Pope's most vigorous expressions as an indication ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... They shall not exhibit with 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
... our sea. They're eminently choice for this hour, too, when you scarcely gather their tint,—that tint, as if moonlight should wish to become a flower,—but their fragrance is an atmosphere all about you. How genuinely spicy it is! It's the very quintessence of those regions all whose sweetness exudes in sun-saturated balsams,—the very breath of pine woods and salt sea winds. How could it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... of a span, buckles in his summe of age. Some of violated vowes, twixt the soules of friend, and friend: But vpon the fairest bowes, or at euerie sentence end; Will I Rosalinda write, teaching all that reade, to know The quintessence of euerie sprite, heauen would in little show. Therefore heauen Nature charg'd, that one bodie should be fill'd With all Graces wide enlarg'd, nature presently distill'd Helens cheeke, but not his heart, Cleopatra's Maiestie: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... hand to you!" said Sean O'Donohue in the very quintessence of bitterness. "And to Moira, too, if she has more to do with you! I'll have naught to do with shenanigannin' renegades and blasphemers that actually import snakes into a world St. Patrick had set off for ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... may be wickeder streets somewhere in the East than the Jalan Tiga, but I do not recall having seen them. It, and the thoroughfares immediately adjoining, in which are situated the opium dens and the houses of prostitution, form a district which represents the very quintessence of Oriental vice. Over virtually every door are signs in Chinese, Malay and English announcing that games of chance are played within. Such resorts are not camouflaged in Borneo. They are as open as a railway station or a public library in the United States. From afternoon ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... 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 I ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the boy's face was worship, the foreman was his lord, head of his group. The pat was an accolade. It was as precious to the boy as it would have been if he had been an aristocrat's son and the accolade had been delivered by his sovereign with a sword. The quintessence of the honor was all there; there was no difference in values; in truth there was no difference present except ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain |
