"Quintessence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spiritual essence of the man, may have inclined him to 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 immortalized 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 ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... It is not Dickens the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court: but Dickens as Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and true. Tiny Tim's thousand-times quoted saying is the quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and through the lad when he says: "God bless us, every one." When an author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to contribute ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... loved her tenderly, 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 ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... 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 by the hemisphere Divided: light the day, and darkness ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... 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, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... the sight and choked. There was something appalling in the sight: it was the quintessence of horror, that widening pool of blood, staining the rug, and flowing from an invisible body that writhed and twisted, while moans of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... were a difficult part; You're a byway to suicide, Adela Chart; But to read of, depicted by exquisite James, O, sure you're the flower and quintessence ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mean 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
... 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... world of objects, and enables man to escape from the stuffed and poisonous atmosphere of his narrow self. It is a streaming outwards of the inmost treasures of the spirit, a consecration of its best activities to the welfare of others. And when this is known to be the native quality and quintessence of love, no one can regard it anywhere, or at any time, as out of place. "Prize-lawful or prize-lawless" it is ever a flower, even though it grow, like the love of the hero of Turf and Towers, in slime. Lust, fleshly desire, which has been too often miscalled ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... it here! this little flask Contains the wonderful quintessence, The perfect flower and efflorescence, Of all the knowledge man can ask! Hold it up thus against ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... born a 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 it, or ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Grey vainly endeavoured to satisfy the Colonists, first with nominated councils, then with local self-governing powers; or how, finally, he completely changed front, went further than Lord Grey, and drafted and sent home a constitution which, for that day, seemed the quintessence ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... true balance of all elements that are invariably essential to life, and their relationship to the elements which are variably essential, would quite naturally appear to constitute the quintessence of research still to be performed. We cannot control such essential factors as climate, weather, sunshine, but man can control the supply and adjustment of nutrients to trees, and it rests entirely with him to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... 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 ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... forsook, And shot the freemen down; Right royally their banners shook As Grant rode through the town. Hail, final triumph of our cause! Hail, chief of mute renown! Grim Magistrate of Silent Laws, A-riding freedom down! Quintessence. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... is this— Her Intellects are as odd and as aukward as her Person; her mind a Composition of Hypocrisy and Vanity; her Head, like the Study of Don Quixot, Stuffed with the exploded— Romances— of the two last Centuries— her Style the quaint Quintessence of Romantic Fustian, and her Manners those of a ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... 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 ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... flower of American gentleman. That is, he's the quintessence of everything that's nice—and 'nasty.' I wish I were married to him for a week. I love Hugo, but he gives me the creeps." She rose and tramped restlessly about the room. "You both give me the creeps. Everything ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... 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 ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... under the varying aspects of our Revolutionary epoch, the Constitution of these United States was the finality of their arduous toils, heroic achievements, and sublime wisdom; and that Constitution, the very sublimation and quintessence of a hundred civilizations, exhibiting the onward progress of the human race, recognizes the Right of Slavery, founded upon the immutable principles ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... of the things that makes up the law of compensation. The law of compensation itself is the quintessence ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... There are no cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal man of Ibsen. All this is not only admitted, but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful of all the eulogies upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw's QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM. Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." In his eyes this absence of an enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue, is the one ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... that perhaps he will devise something 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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 ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... the Useless. Even crockery, cutlery, and furniture should never be Beautiful at the cost of utility. Their Beauty should be implicated with their natural shapes, inblent with and inseparable from their uses, not a monstrous accretion from without. The most artistic knife is the quintessence ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... yes, several customers, I fancy, are on the look-out for him. Virtue incarnate! The very quintessence of creeds! Who is ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... But I like it well enough, nevertheless. It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America,—a satisfaction that I never enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was continually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... semi-divine and into whose story was interwoven the history of the great republic. Nor had the first husband given to Livia been less noble, for Tiberius Claudius Nero was descended like Livia from Appius the Blind, though through another son of the great censor. In Livia was concentrated the quintessence of the great Roman aristocracy: she was at Rome what in London to-day the daughter of the Duke of Westminster or the Duke of Bedford would be, and her noble rank explains the role which her family had played during the Civil War. In the great revolution which broke out ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... modify De Quincey's well-worn phrase. For that which is deepest in this group of masterpieces is not power, but something greater and more inclusive, of which power is but a single form of expression,—life; that quintessence of the unbroken experience and activity of the race which includes not only thought, power, beauty, and every kind of skill, but, below all these, the living soul of ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 has ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... from her 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 ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... difficulty and never executed a page of his great histories till he had consulted every known authority, so that every sentence is the quintessence of many books, the product of many hours of drudging research in the great libraries. Today, "Sartor Resartus" is everywhere. You can get it for a mere trifle at almost any bookseller's, and hundreds of thousands of copies are scattered over the world. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... every poet were a Shakespeare the world would be a dull place; you need the tripe to form a contrast. The best way to enjoy the quintessence of roses, Mac, is to take a walk through ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... pilgrimage, That the stretching 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: Attalanta's ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the occupation shows the tendency, the quintessence of character. Some men are born rulers and leaders; others are born followers. Both are necessary, and I must ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... 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 live ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... 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 measure of irony. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 say nothing ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... the candlesticks are dainty, the saint's scarlet hat is dainty, and its violet tassel, and its ribbon, and his blue cloak and his spare pair of shoes, and his little brown partridge—it is all a perfect quintessence of innocent luxury—absolute delight, without one drawback in it, nor taint of the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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
... 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 rapture ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... not accurately name a single one of the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love—gallant "service," "adoration," and "purity"—while "patience and impatience" may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the 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
... this passion to hide its hideousness under the disguise of love, and thus this most sacred and hallowed name is prostituted to signify that which is most vile and loathsome. Depravity? No. Goodness of heart, generosity of affections, the very quintessence of good nature! But God is love, and love that does not see the image of the Creator in its object is not ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... 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 an artificial ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 and ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... heaven, you whose essence Compos'd was of man's purest quintessence, To you, to virtuous you, I dedicate ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... him more glory gain Then in St. Lewes, or thy last Henry Great, Who tam'd his foes in warrs, in bloud and sweat, Thy fame is spread as far, I dare be bold, In all the Zones, the temp'rate, hot and cold, Their Trophies were but heaps of wounded slain, Shine the quintessence of an heroick brain. The oaken Garland ought to deck their brows, Immortal Bayes to thee all men allows, Who in thy tryumphs never won by wrongs, Lead'st millions chained by eyes, by ears, by tongues, Oft have I wondred at the hand of heaven, In giving one what would have ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... myrrh, and gold. The crib becomes an altar; therefore dies No ox nor sheep; for in their fodder lies The Prince of Peace, who, thankful for His bed, Destroys those rites in which their blood was shed: The quintessence of earth He takes, and fees, And precious gums distilled from weeping trees; Rich metals and sweet odors now declare The glorious blessings which His laws prepare, To clear us from the base and loathsome ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... impetuous, soft, affectionate, his enthusiasm clothed the universe with grandeur, and sent his spirit forth to explore its secrets and mingle warmly in its interests. Thus poetry in Schiller was not one but many gifts. It was, what true poetry is always, the quintessence of general mental riches, the purified result of strong thought and conception, and of refined as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... with her, though only for two minutes, surpassed even the rapture of the restaurant. It was the quintessence of Life. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... he's the very quintessence of jealousy; he keeps no male creature in his house; and from abroad he lets no man ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... ensures us the majority in Lyons."[3325] From universal suffrage thus subjected to so much sifting, submitted to such heavy pressure, heated and refined in the revolutionary alembic, those who control it obtain all they want, a concentrated extract, the quintessence ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... first 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 ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... This chapter is a prayer, and held in great veneration by the Mohammedans, who give it several other honorable titles; as the chapter of prayer, of praise, of thanksgiving, of treasure. They esteem it as the quintessence of the whole Koran, and often repeat it in their devotions both public and private, as the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... a quintessence of Protestant feeling," answered Vincent; "I consider myself a good Protestant; but the pleasure you have in hunting these ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... 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
... poem on 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 on morals (along with, as a matter of course, due commendation of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Socialism. But there are 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. ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... and Mrs. Gerard for many years I had a longish conversation with them on the day after their arrival. The quintessence of the ambassador's remarks was that he was completely neutral, but that Berlin expected ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... friends watched his career from afar. So, thinking of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off. He looked at her quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new spring time, each new summer, each new month and new year—deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming—does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... 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 ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... we seemed to be in a vast, many-pillared hall. The stream close by afforded water for our blessed teapot; venison frizzled with mild, appetizing sound upon the ends of pine sticks; matchless beans allowed themselves to become seductively crisp upon our tin plates. That supper seemed to me then the quintessence of gastronomy, and I am sure Cotter and I must have said some very good after-dinner things, though I long ago forgot them all. Within the ring of warmth, on elastic beds of pine-needles, we curled up, and fell swiftly ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... sensitiveness, is represented in alchemy by the Rebis [from res bina, the double thing]. This substance, at once male and female, is a mercury [Symbol: Mercury] animated by its sulphur [Symbol: Sulphur] and transformed by this act into Azoth [Symbol: Mercury], i.e., into this quintessence of the elements [fifth essence] of which the flaming star is the symbol. It should be noted that this star is always placed in such a way that it receives the double radiation of the male sun [Symbol: Gold] and the female moon [Symbol: Moon]; its light is thus of a bisexual ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... o'er his own past pages, Punch, with tearful smile, can trace That fine talent's various stages, Caustic satire, gentle grace, Feats and freaks of Cockney funny— BROWN, and JONES, and ROBINSON; And, huge hive of Humour's honey, Quaint quintessence of rich fun, Coming fresh as June-breeze briary With old memories of our youth, Thrice immortal Pips's Diary! Masterpiece ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... writings because they "came home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate title explains their character: Counsels Civil and Moral, that is, pieces of advice touching the conduct of life, "of a nature whereof men shall find much in experience, little in books." The essays contain the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of {92} men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 amiable are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... 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
... everlasting Father. As for you, and all the rest of the race, you dare not presume to compare yourselves with us. Probably you are made in the image of the second and third persons of the Trinity, while we carry upon our withered and wearisome faces the quintessence of the Godhead." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the grass that springs up and soon withers away; but he is also more than this. The quintessence of dust, he is a son of the gods as well as a son of the soil. He is the direct product of the great creative power; therefore all the Athapascan tribes west of the Rocky Mountains—the Kenai, the Kolushes, and the Atnai—claim descent from a raven—from that same mighty cloud-bird, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... woman 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 mother of ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... our time in the murky light of Prescott's 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, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the Soul of the Heathen Gods. One sets up with a receipt received from Van Helmonts own hands; Another hath received from a Jew the shining of Moses Face; nay I have heard a Pseudochymist blasphemously brag, he saw in the making of a grand Elixir, the Quintessence of the Trinity in Unity, and infinite other pitiful captivations of silly people, to be seen on every Gate and Post of this City; such as are the Spirit of the Salt of the World, Panchymagogon, and other ten-footed Greek names, and some other Mongrel non-sensical ones ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... 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 size ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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
... secretaries of the three great powers of Europe, possesses a more singular body of military than even the defunct Ottoman corps of green-grocers. It consists of officers without troops. Its inventor, Armansperg, the quintessence of Bavarian corruption in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... mixed up these discussions with the body of the work, he would have laboured for astronomers only. If he had suppressed all discussions, the book would have interested amateurs only. To avoid this double rock, Bailly decided on writing a connected narrative with the quintessence of the facts, and to place the proofs and the discussions of the merely conjectural parts, under the appellation of explanations in separate chapters. Bailly's History, without forfeiting the character of a serious and erudite work, became accessible to the public in general, and contributed ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 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 les maisons par ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... to the turn of the seven wicked women to speak, who, although they did not much relish this conversation, yet, as the truth comes out when the wine goes about, answered, that whoever had the heart basely to touch only this quintessence of the charms of love deserved to be ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... in Ingrain Street in an uncompromising mansion I always associated with the Sabbath, not only because I used to be taken there on decorous Sunday visits by my father, but because it was the very quintessence of Presbyterianism. The moment I entered its "portals"—as Mr. Hawthorne appropriately would have called them—my spirit was overwhelmed and suffocated by its formality and orderliness. Within its stern walls Nathaniel Durrett ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... seasick and a club window to decorate, that I'm contented with my lot. But at heart I'm the most domestic individual that ever desecrated a dinner coat; and sometimes the natural tendencies of the gregarious male animal will not down. There's too much of the concentrated quintessence of unadulterated happiness lying around here. ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... could not be anything else but the second bulb, that is to say, the quintessence of all the ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and that as such it is ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... His plays are like Watteau's pictures, which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the realities of life. His characters, like Watteau's, seem to possess, not quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality—the distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting in the human spirit. His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... which a debate arose was that which recognised the original contract between King and people. It was not to be expected that the Tory peers would suffer a phrase which contained the quintessence of Whiggism to pass unchallenged. A division took place; and it was determined by fifty-three votes to forty-six ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... like to come with me when I propose to leave him at home. After the first half hour he lags behind, as if he had walked four hours. My childless marriage is thus suddenly blessed with an interesting phenomenon, and I take in, in rapid doses, the quintessence of paternal cares and troubles. All this has done me a great deal of good; it was a splendid diversion, for which, as I said before, I have to thank you. You knew what I wanted. Of course the youth pleases me immensely in other ways, and, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... 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, in order that the world may be prepared and nobody ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... religion of the western world which is founded upon monotheism. He proves that the Christian God is only the fantastic reflection, the reflected image of man. But that God is himself the product of a lengthy process of abstraction, the concentrated quintessence of the earlier tribal and national gods. And man also whose reflection that God is, is not a real man, but is likewise the quintessence of many real men, the abstract human, and therefore himself again the creature of thought. The same Feuerbach who on each page preaches ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... to 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 of a wide ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... such pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of a future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender that something we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal—a squirrel or a spider-monkey of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes; the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy, and most vocal of small beauties." Or this, as the quintessence of a sly remark: "After that Mantel got on to his horse and rode away. It was black and rainy, but he had never needed moon or lantern to find what he sought by night, whether his own house, or a fat cow—also his own, perhaps." So ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... of men, 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 not but despise him for his facile ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... man gone mad? That he had! And in the blood-red haze that hung before his glittering eyes was framed the face of the girl who had spurned him but a few days before. She was the embodiment of love that had crossed his path and stirred up the very quintessence of evil within him. From the first she had drawn him. From the first she had aroused within his soul a conflict of emotions such as he had never known before. And from the night when, in the Hawley-Crowles box at the opera he had held her hand and looked ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Bertie, very immorally. "I'm glad you remind us of them, Vere; you're such a quintessence of decorum and respectability yourself! I say—anybody know anything of this fellow of the Tenth that's ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the Antipuritan reaction pervades almost the whole polite literature of the reign of Charles the Second. But the very quintessence of that spirit will be found in the comic drama. The playhouses, shut by the meddling fanatic in the day of his power, were again crowded. To their old attractions new and more powerful attractions had been added. Scenery, dresses, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still 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 combined in beauty's worthiness, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... d'Arblay! Lord William Lennox, in his Drafts on My Memory, is full of irrepressible and fascinating memorabilia, from the story of General Bullard's salad-dressing to important dramatic history connected with the theater of his time. The Spectator was the quintessence of gossip in an age of gossip and good conversation. We could go a great deal further back to the gossips of Theocritus, who are as living and life-like as if we had just met them in the park. All biography is a putting together of trifles which in the aggregate make up the ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... system of duties? If two states can agree upon these matters, why not four? And still further, said the Maryland message,—dropping the weightiest part of the proposal into a subordinate clause, just as women are said to put the quintessence of their letters into the postscript,—might it not be well enough, if we are going to have such a conference, to invite commissioners from all the thirteen states to attend it? An informal discussion can hurt ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... and Roxanne followed 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
... sleeves, who 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 ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... frequently undergoes a conveyance, necessity, we suppose, is the lot of the owner, but the lawyer fattens: To have and to hold are words of singular import; they charm beyond music; are the quintessence of language; the leading figure in rhetoric. But how would he fare if land was never conveyed? He must starve ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... which his previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence. "Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... though I have profoundly appreciated the exquisite artistry of both these. No French writer, however, has moved me so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in the humor which endears these, and is the quintessence of their charm. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... 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. This, however, the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt of the sanity of mankind, and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to live and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it—if one is ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... She loved her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased her to wear them in the morning, she wore them; and in five minutes she was capable of making the sourest puritan forget to frown on her and them. To Robert she always seemed the quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their best. All her freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful. At her freest and gayest there were things in her—restraints, reticences, perceptions—which implied behind her ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 of dames. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more hideous for the foil, But not repay the drudging reader's toil; (For who for one poor pearl of clouded ray Through Alpine dunghills delves his desperate way? Did genius to thy verse such bane impart? No. 'Twas the demon of thy venom'd heart, (Thy heart with rancour's quintessence endued). And the blind zeal of a misjudging crowd. Thus from rank soil a poison'd mushroom sprung, Nursling obscene of mildew and of dung: 110 By Heaven design'd on its own native spot Harmless to enlarge its bloated bulk, and rot. But gluttony the abortive nuisance ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... never seen a book in her hand, except her prayer-book; how was he to do anything for a girl like that? For Godfrey knew no way of doing people good without the intervention of books. How could he get near one that had no taste for the quintessence of humanity? How was he to offer her the only help he had, when she desired no such help? "But," he continued, reflecting further, "she may have thirsted, may even now be athirst, without knowing that books are the bottles of the water of life!" Perhaps, if he could make her drink once, she ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... water, if 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
... 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 ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... silly little world—all this quintessence of fashion and elegance, long out of date, all exhaled the acrid odour of rose-water and essence ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... reason, perhaps, they so dominate their literature, making its characteristic to be the working out of extravagantly vehement feelings to an inevitable conflagration. At least this uncontrolled excitement was what we learnt to look on as the quintessence of English literature. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Dave, 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 ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... portraiture of women, more 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
... he 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
... not a prohibition district, and if the happy, unreflective bird chooses to partake even to excess of the free offering of Nature, the quintessence of the flowers of the tree distilled by sunshine, why should not he? Am I the only one to be "recompensed by the sweetness and satisfaction ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... astonishment followed Mr. C. like a shadow, through the whole 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 thing that every body wanted; and, in the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Smith wished to express the very quintessence of brutality and meanness, he would refer to ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes |
