"Quintessence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been refitting and amusing ourselves on shore by dancing at dignity balls given by the upper-class copper-coloured washerwomen, who are the quintessence of perfection in affectation, when we were obliged to bid adieu to these interesting copper and coal-skinned ladies, as the ship was reported ready for sea, and the following morning we weighed and stood out of the ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... blockade was to be declared, Mr. Seward seems to have been a thorough novice in the whole matter, and in an official interview with Lord Lyons, Mr. Seward was assisted by his chief clerk, who was therefore the quintessence of the wisdom of the foreign affairs, a man not even mastering the red-tape traditions of the department, without any genuine instruction, without ideas. For this chief clerk, all that he knew of a blockade was that it was in ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... sea-sickness come delightful intervals of calm sea and fresh breezes, when the party fly to the hurricane deck to get the very quintessence of life on the ocean wave. One morning Mrs. Jerrold and Edith were sitting there alone, with rugs and all sorts of head devices in soft wools and flannels, and books and a basket of fruit. The matron of the party ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... intrinsicality^, inbeing^, inherence, inhesion^; subjectiveness; ego; egohood^; essence, noumenon; essentialness^ &c adj.; essential part, quintessence, incarnation, quiddity, gist, pith, marrow, core, sap, lifeblood, backbone, heart, soul; important part &c (importance) 642. principle, nature, constitution, character, type, quality, crasis^, diathesis^. habit; temper, temperament; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to be alive after death, which we call the aspiration after immortality, is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly says, "All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our passions;" and the doctrine, that we are immortal because we should extremely like to be so, contains the quintessence of suspiciousness. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... rich, lethargic, sententious, dogmatic, and, in short, the quintessence of the commonplace. I need not say, therefore, that he is credited by the world with unlimited common-sense. And for once the world is right. He has nothing-original about him, save so much of sin as he may have inherited from our first parents; there is no ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences: his writings are admirable—he himself is not agreeable." This volatile being in himself personified the quintessence of that society which is called "the world," and could not endure that equality of intellect which genius exacts. He rejected Chatterton, and quarrelled with every literary man and every artist whom ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... directed straight against the perfect revelation of the love of God in Christ. There the sin of man reached its climax and did its worst. What was done there against Christ, and against God in Him, was a kind of embodiment and quintessence of the sin of the whole world. And undoubtedly it was this which was pressing on Jesus; this was "the travail of His soul." He was looking close at sin's utmost hideousness; He was sickened with its contact; He was crushed with its brutality—crushed to death. Yet this human nature was ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... Maupassant, 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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
... 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
... 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. Their "profound thinkers," their "lofty theorists," do not even succeed ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... a book could be dangerous. It came to us so gray, so Cimmerian, so corpse-like, that we could hardly endure its presence; we shuddered before it as if it had been a spectre. It struck us as the very quintessence of musty ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... that 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
... there 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 ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse. The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegade intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of "Wat Tyler," are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself—containing the quintessence of his own attributes. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... prince whom her father had chosen. That Marcus Aurelius adored her is certain. His notebook shows it. A more tender-hearted and perfect lover romance may show, but history cannot. He must have been the quintessence of refinement, a thoroughbred to his finger-tips; one for whom that purple mantle was too gaudy, and yet who bore it, as he bore everything else, in that self-abnegatory spirit which the higher reaches ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... 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 ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... didn't really mean it," retorted Craig with a laugh which Grant thought the quintessence of impertinence. "You never dreamed she'd fall in ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Eternity without beginning. The great World, as Heaven and Earth, was first, then was Man, the Little World, taken out of the greater; the Water was separated from the Earth, the Water was the Matter whereon the everlasting Spirit of God moved; the Little World was formed of the noblest Earth, as its Quintessence, by the Aquosity which yet was in the Earth, and all was only Natural; but after the breathing in of the Divine heating Breath, immediately the Supernatural was added; so then the Natural and Supernatural were knit and united. The great World is perishable, ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... 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, ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... Nicolette cannot be made into a representative medieval romance: there is nothing else like it; and the qualities that make it what it is are the opposite of the rhetorical self-possession, the correct and deliberate narrative of Chrestien and his school. It contains the quintessence of romantic imagination, but it is quite unlike the most fashionable ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... expression on 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 that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' of the Muses Elizium. There are portions of the work, it is true, in which the more vulgar strains of the conventional pastoral make themselves heard, as in the satires of the fourth and tenth Nymphals; but for the most part we are allowed to wander undisturbed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... 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. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Naples I did view Faces of celestial hue; Venetian dames I have seen many, (I only saw them, truck'd not any) Of Spanish beauties, Dutch and French, I have beheld the quintessence[3]: Yet saw I none that could out-shine, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... present—and which we call "spontaneous," because we are ignorant of their causation—is as wholly unknown to the historian of scientific ideas as it was to biological specialists before 1858. But that suggestion is the central idea of the 'Origin of Species,' and contains the quintessence of Darwinism. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... heroic mold and his countrymen continue to regard him as the completed embodiment of their national ideals. And in the same measure that Tegnr stands forth as an expression of Swedish race characteristics it may be said that Fritiofs Saga is the quintessence of ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... on. Staring you in the face; hailing from East, West, North and South are banners; held aloft by unseen hands, bearing on them—the quintessence of AMERICA'S INGRATITUDE,—these devices: ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... early Socialists ignored. Whatever sort of community you dream of, you realize that it has to be made of the sort of people you meet every day or of the children growing up under their influence. The damping words of the old philosopher to the ardent Social reformer of seventeen were really the quintessence of our criticism of revolutionary Socialism: "Will your aunts join us, my dear? No! Well—is the grocer on our side? And the family solicitor? We shall have to provide for them all, you know, unless ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... his own genius motives originated by the Pisani, Giotto, Giacopo della Quercia, Donatello, Masaccio, while working in the spirit of Signorelli. He fused and recast the antecedent materials of design in sculpture and painting, producing a quintessence of art beyond which it was impossible to advance without breaking the rhythm, so intensely strung, and without contradicting too violently the parent inspiration. He strained the chord of rhythm to its very utmost, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Danewort. See Mr Gillett's note for Book of Quintessence in Hampole's Treatises. Fr. hieble, Wallwort, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... went. 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 generations of rich, happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 Christians do the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... to say she is better," said the doctor, much amused by the anxious look of the face, which had hitherto been the quintessence of cool self-possession. "But she has had a great shake, and will have to be sent to the country for change of air when we ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... very few passages, but these 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 actions of living organisms. These experiments are conclusive and the conclusions ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... As Grant rode through the town. Then staves for muskets they 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
... represented to him the best of the day. The morning he reserved for hard work, and during the course of it he smoked but one pipe. A quotation from Fuller which was often on his lips expressed his point of view: "Spill not the morning, which is the quintessence of the day, in recreation. For sleep itself is a recreation. And to open the morning thereto is to add sauce ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there was a certain cracking, cogging, pettifogging, butter-milk slave, sir, one Churms, sir, that is the very quintessence of all the knaves in the bunch: and if the best man of all his kin had been but so good as a yeoman's son, he should have been a marked knave by letters patents. And he, sir, comes me sneaking, and cosens them both of their wench, and is run ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... comprehension and sublime beyond conception, for whose majesty every name was too mean, the fount and crown of Good and Beauty, in whole all that exists ever has been and ever shall be. He it was who, like a brimful vessel, overflowed with the quintessence of what we call divine; and from this effluence emanated the divine Mind, the pure intelligence which is to the One what light is to the sun. This Mind with its vitality—a life not of time but of eternity—could stir or remain passive as it listed; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages, that they contained the quintessence of the nation's turbulence as well as of its intellectual activity and ambition. The quaint old quadrangle of Merton, called, nobody seems to know why, "Mob" Quad, may be regarded as the cradle of collegiate life in England, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... "Satis disputasti; which is at much as to say, in the colloquial style, 'Bad enough.' Satis et bene disputasti, 'Pretty fair,—tolerable.' Satis et optime disputasti, 'Go thy ways, thou flower and quintessence of Wranglers.' Such are the compliments to be expected from the Moderator, after the act is ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... was here this morning in a white heat of passion over it, and I believe apoplexy or hydrophobia is imminent for the old lady. The fact of Mrs. Thorne's being still a married woman gives the affair a queer look to squeamish mortals, and the Cumberland women are the quintessence of conservative old-fogyism; they might be fresh from the South Carolina woods for all the advancement they can boast. It's wicked, and I'm ashamed of myself, but whenever I think of Ethel Thorne trying conclusions with those strait-laced Cumberlands, I'm filled with ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... interests. Thus poetry in Schiller was not one but many gifts. It was not the 'lean and flashy song' of an ear apt for harmony, combined with a maudlin sensibility, or a mere animal ferocity of passion, and an imagination creative chiefly because unbridled: 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 well as powerful emotion. In his writings, we behold him a moralist, a philosopher, a man of universal knowledge: in each of these capacities he is great, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... long preliminary conversation: This has no other idea than that of itself, and can only refer to itself: this is no one special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; 'tis I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... continued, "and I rooted. . . . I wonder—that fellow on the horse—I have a feeling about him. See, he's been riding hard and long-you can tell by the way the horse drops his legs. He sags a bit himself. . . . But isn't it beautiful, all that out there—the real quintessence of life." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... 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 ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... development. It can be no other way, he says, since the blood is the source of nourishment and the liver is necessary for formation of the blood. Furthermore, he contends, "the seed is no part of the ... aliment of the body ... the seed is the quintessence of the blood."[13] Ross is an epigeneticist, to be sure, but so was Aristotle, and Ross prefers to maintain the supremacy of logic and the concepts of the Aristotelian tradition as a guide ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... 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 ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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 Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... were reported to play "seven-up" in a barn, on the haymow, and the enormity of this practice made him shudder. He had once seen a pack of greasy "playing-cards," and it seemed to him to contain the quintessence of sin. If he had desired to defy all Divine law and outrage all human society, he felt that he could do it by shuffling them. And he was quite right. The two bad boys enjoyed in stealth their scandalous pastime, because they ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... (9) ——. The Quintessence of Capitalism. A study of the history and psychology of the modern business man. Translated from the German by M. Epstein. New ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... from his seat to the ground was deliberate, even for him; his silent nod to those wide-eyed, loose-jawed old men upon the sidewalk was the very quintessence of secretive dignity, and yet had he taken up his position there on the corner of the uneven boardwalk and cried aloud his sensation, like a bally-hoo advertising the excellence of his own particular side-show, he could not have equaled the results which the very profundity of ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... 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 ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... 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 ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... kingdom of Queen Quintessence. Pantagruel and his companions went to this kingdom in search of the "holy bottle."—Rabelais, Pantagruel, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... course not," 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 ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... Each widening scale and bursting film unfold, Swell the green cup, and tint the flower with gold; While in bright veins the silvery Sap ascends, 420 And refluent blood in milky eddies bends; While, spread in air, the leaves respiring play, Or drink the golden quintessence of day. —So from his shell on Delta's shower-less isle Bursts into life the Monster of the Nile; 425 First in translucent lymph with cobweb-threads The Brain's fine floating tissue swells, and spreads; Nerve after nerve the glistening spine descends, The red Heart dances, the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the most dreadful error among the Jews from which any nation can suffer. The tradition says that the same Nehemias Todros who had a princely title, Nassi, was the first to bring to Poland the book, Zohar, in which was explained the quintessence of the perilous doctrine, and from that day there comes from Poland the mixture of the Talmud with Kabalistic ideas which has influenced very badly the minds and the lives of the Polish Jews. History is silent regarding the quarrels and fights aroused by this innovation ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... concerning immortality. Were the extreme claims of naturalism to be established, there would be no ground whatsoever upon which to maintain the immortality of man, mere dust returning unto dust. The philosophical concept of immortality is due to the supposition that the quintessence of the individual's nature is divine.[213:18] But several possibilities are at this point open to us. The first would maintain the survival after death of a recognizable and discrete personality. Another would suppose a preservation ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... perplexities was the 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
... political leader. He was a short man, rather stout, with large whiskers; he wore a blue ribbon in the button-hole of his dress-coat. Lady Eynesford considered him remarkably like a grocer, and the very quintessence of nonconformity; but he at least was indisputably respectable, a devoted husband, and the father of a large family, behind whose ranks he was in the habit of walking to chapel twice every Sunday. Sometimes he preached when he got there. Just ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... 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 ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... In their line, I grant you, oyster and lobster- sauce are the pillars of Hercules. But I speak of the cruet sauces, where the quintessence of the sapid is condensed in a phial. I can taste in my mind's palate a combination, which, if I could give it reality, I would christen with the name of my college, and hand it down to posterity as ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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 live away ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the 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 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; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... 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, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but another name for Christian Science, [21] the cognomen of all true religion, the quintessence of Christianity, that heals disease and sin and destroys death! Part and parcel of Truth and Love, wherever one ray of its effulgence looks in upon the heart, behold [25] a better man, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... banquet—is 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 ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... very 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 characterized by the habit of using certain jejune 'categories' with which to perform its ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... comfortable deck-chairs, our two servants at our backs, the quintessence of elegant leisure, sipped delicate tea from beautiful, fragile cups, and looked on at these wretched ones whose labour made possible the journey of our little world. We did not speak to them, nor recognize ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... is even surpassed where, as in the goddess' mane-like tresses of hair fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in masses yielding only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... world. It calls up some delightful image—a little nut-tree with a silver walnut and a golden pear; some romantic adventure only for the child's delight and liberation from the bondage of unseeing dullness: it brings before the mind the quintessence of some good thing: ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... had 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, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... prevailed that if the mother does not get what her longing soul supremely desires, that the on-coming baby is going to cry and cry until it is given what the mother wanted with all her heart and did not get. Such an idea is the very quintessence of folly and the personification of ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... strictest economy, it would perhaps be interesting to go deeper into the ways of those untiring thrifty ants who seem to know how "To cut a centime in four" and extract the quintessence from a bone. My concierge is a precious example for such a study, having discovered a way of bleaching clothes without boiling, and numerous recipes for reducing the high cost of living ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... read such [197]hyperbolical eulogiums, as of Aristotle, that he was wisdom itself in the abstract, [198]a miracle of nature, breathing libraries, as Eunapius of Longinus, lights of nature, giants for wit, quintessence of wit, divine spirits, eagles in the clouds, fallen from heaven, gods, spirits, lamps of the world, dictators, Nulla ferant talem saecla futura virum: monarchs, miracles, superintendents of wit and learning, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 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
... 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
... 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 Majesty," flowed far more copiously than from ours which ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... calm as a summer's evening. When it pleased the Blessed Master that I should suffer reproach and vilification for my testimony, then it was that the river of joy which flows from the Throne flowed through my heart as never before. It was a new experience—a quintessence of joy. The shouts of burning martyrs were no longer a mystery. I stagger no more at the account of the saints who took joyfully the spoiling of their goods. My soul is bathed in an ocean ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... boggle here, I say no more; This is the very Quintessence of Trade, And ev'ry Hope of Gain depends upon it; None who neglect it ever did grow rich, Or ever will, or can by Indian Commerce. By this old Ogden built his stately House, Purchas'd Estates, and grew a little King. He, like an honest Man, bought all ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... 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 ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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
... not produce that effect," pursued Peter Ivanovitch, "in a world not meant for it. But you shall find there a mind—no!—the quintessence of feminine intuition which will understand any perplexity you may be suffering from by the irresistible, enlightening force of sympathy. Nothing can remain obscure before that—that—inspired, yes, inspired penetration, this ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... a fair revenge," Desroches said to him; "mind you extract its quintessence. You hold ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... men, therefore, that would please God make conscience of believing; on pain, I say, of displeasing him; on pain of being, with Cain, rejected, and on pain of being damned in hell. 'He that believeth not shall be damned' (Mark 16:16). Faith is the very quintessence of all gospel obedience, it being that which must go before other duties, and that which also must accompany whatever I do in the worship of God, if it be accepted of him.[35] Here you may see a reason why the force ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... winnows all this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is deprived of life is ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... particle of dust in the cupboards, nor a cloud in the air; the wooden shutters are dainty, 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 ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Connaisseuse, though there should be no other reason for it. As for me, what I value particularly is, that by means of these ingenious visits, we learn a hundred things which we ought necessarily to know, and which are the quintessence of wit. Through them we hear the scandal of the day, or whatever niceties are going on in prose or verse. We know, at the right time, that Mr. So-and-so has written the finest piece in the world on such a subject; that Mrs. So-and-so has adapted words to such a tune; that a certain ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me! Will you take back my gratitude for it?—agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the whole spirit brought to a quintessence; And thus the chilliest aspects may concentre A hidden nectar under a cold presence.[mb] And such are many—though I only meant her From whom I now deduce these moral lessons, On which the Muse has always sought to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... children's playing, and talking to their puppets, the ascribing any knowledge to mere machines. Hence it is that the ancients themselves, who knew no real substance but the body, pretended, however, that the soul of a man was a fifth element, or a sort of quintessence without name, unknown here below, indivisible, immutable, and altogether celestial and divine, because they could not conceive that the terrestrial matter of the four elements could think, and know itself: Aristoteles quintam quandam naturam ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... pens that ever poet held Had fed the feeling of their master's 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, If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness; Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best, Which into words ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... moods, cases, or genders, except indeed when a woman happens accidentally to be slain, then the verdict is always brought in man-slaughter. The essence of the law is altercation; for the law can altercate, fulminate, deprecate, irritate, and go on at any rate. Now the quintessence of the law has, according to its name, five parts. The first is the beginning, or incipiendum; the second the uncertainty, or dubitandum; the third delay, or puzzliendum; fourthly replication without endum; and, fifthly, ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit." Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a destructive criticism as ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... in a swift plane in perfect weather. Archie didn't lose time. Soon the hangars behind looked like a child's toys, and the world ran away from us till it seemed like a great golden bowl spilling over with the quintessence of light. The air was cold and my hands numbed, but I never felt them. As we throbbed and tore southward, sometimes bumping in eddies, sometimes swimming evenly in a stream of motionless ether, my head and heart grew as light as a boy's. I forgot ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... visit: this has warmed their politesse. I should have known the Ambassadress any where by the likeness to her family. He is cold and stately, and not much tasted here. She is very sensible; but neither of them satisfy me in one point; I wanted to see something that was the quintessence of the newest bon ton, that had the last bel air, and spoke the freshest jargon. These people have scarce ever lived at Paris, are reasonable, and little amusing with follies. They have brought a cousin of' his, a Monsieur ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... writer who 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 ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... one 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
... upon them. Brighton faced me; next to it divine Southsea beckoned; then I saw the beach at Sidmouth, the Tilly Whim caves near Swanage—was it in those unhaunted caves, or amid the tumult of life which hums about the Worthing bandstand, that I should find Bliss in its quintessence? ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... undoubtedly would get rhetoric taught more effectively than would more philosophical or literary treatises. Thus in Guarino's school at Ferrara (1429-1460) the Ad Herennium was regarded as the quintessence of pure Ciceronian doctrine of oratory, and was made the starting point and standing authority in teaching rhetoric. In more advanced classes it was supplemented by the De oratore, Orator, and what was known of Quintilian.[157] The Ciceronianus of Erasmus testifies that by the next ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... at 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
... They limited themselves to an inquiry into the opinions of the accused, not conceiving it possible that anyone could think differently from themselves except in pure perversity. Believing themselves the exclusive possessors of truth, wisdom, the quintessence of good, they attributed to their opponents nothing but error and evil. They felt themselves all-powerful; they ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... 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 ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... to make men unaccustomed to continue so long under water without suffocation, or (as the lately mentioned person that went in the vessel affirms) without inconvenience; I was answered, that Drebel conceived, that it is not the whole body of the air, but a certain quintessence (as Chymists speak) or spirituous part of it, that makes it fit for respiration; which being spent, the remaining grosser body, or carcase, if I may so call it, of the air, is unable to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart; so that, for aught I could gather, besides the ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... 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 of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... its name implies, is the quintessence of all the "fast" dances. At the time of the Polka mania it was very much in vogue, and was almost as great a favourite as the Deux Temps. Although its popularity has greatly declined of late, it generally occurs twice or thrice in the programme of every ball-room; and the music of the Galop is, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man is the paragon of animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... Chase," its commonness is its 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 merely amusing but useful, since ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • 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 his epic, so did she slowly approach the ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... herself, he said once and again as he rode, was it more than a just sacrifice to his wronged honor? As such he would accept it. If she had, it was best—best for her, and best for him! What so much did it matter! She was very lovely!—true—but what was the quintessence of dust to him? Where either was there any great loss? He and she would soon be wrapped up in the primal darkness, the mother and grave of all things, together!—no, not together; not even in the dark of nothingness ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... quarters. No settlement in which we find a minyan (ten men necessary for divine worship), but there we will also find a cheder, a school in which the Bible and the Talmud are taught. Indeed, study is the first duty of the Jew; it is the quintessence of his religion. The unravelling of God's Word has been from time immemorial regarded as the greatest need, the most ennobling occupation of man—a work commanded by God. The Talmud teems with precepts ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Fruit-dish of Grapes, Nuts, and 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 Bridemaids ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... and a simple strength of purpose from which all aims of others bound back stone-dead: what brilliance of genius or quintessence of mother-wit can hope to ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... moreover, does not accurately name a single one of the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love—gallant "service," "adoration," and "purity"—while "patience and impatience" may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... what I expected. Perhaps nothing else than that special intensity of existence which is the quintessence of youthful aspirations. Whatever I expected I did not expect to be beset by hurricanes. I knew better than that. In the Gulf of Siam there are no hurricanes. But neither did I expect to find myself bound hand and foot to the hopeless extent which was revealed to me ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... his surprise, and Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk having taken off his spectacles, wiped them, and deposited them in his pocket, so far forgot both himself and his dignity, as to turn round three times upon his heel in the quintessence of astonishment and admiration. There was no doubt about the matter—the pardon should be obtained. So at least swore, with a round oath, Professor Rub-a-dub, and so finally thought the illustrious Von Underduk, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... its glory upon our hopes. It is in this simple vision, which is one and enduring, and not in the changing facts, that we must look for meaning and for truth. The three quiet days we spent together on board the Lion remain to me memorable and full of import, eventless and containing the very quintessence of existence. We shared the sunshine, always together, very close, turning hand in hand to the sea, whose unstained blueness continued under our feet the blue above our heads, as though we had been snatched up into ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... lapse 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. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... said 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 Australia, and a good deal of the Western, ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... represented as an ugly, petty, mischievous spirit, who rejoiced in playing off all manner of fantastic tricks upon poor humanity. Milton seems to have been the first who succeeded in giving any but a ludicrous description of him. The sublime pride, which is the quintessence of evil, was unconceived before his time. All other limners made him merely grotesque, but Milton made him awful. In this the monks shewed themselves but miserable romancers; for their object undoubtedly was to represent the fiend as terrible as possible. But there was nothing ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... 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
... sense, books are the galleries in which spirits are caught and fastened upon the pages. Books are storehouses into which facts and principles have been harvested. Just as a bit of coal tells us what ferns and flowers grew in the far-off era, so the book gives us the very quintessence of man's thoughts about life and duty and death. Nor is there any other way of gaining these vital knowledges. Life is too short to obtain them through conversation or travel. Nor is any youth ready for his task until ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... either see excellence anywhere or nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our caricaturists, with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young and audacious writer, who distilled the quintessence of political ideas better than any other man, or compressed the work of some prolific writer as he held him up to ridicule; he was talking with the poet whose works would have eclipsed all the writings of the time if his ability had been as strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... that not much need be said about it. 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Writers of Morality prescribe to their Readers after the Galenick way; their Medicines are made up in large Quantities. An Essay-Writer must practise in the Chymical Method, and give the Virtue of a full Draught in a few Drops. Were all Books reduced thus to their Quintessence, many a bulky Author would make his Appearance in a Penny-Paper: There would be scarce such a thing in Nature as a Folio. The Works of an Age would be contained on a few Shelves; not to mention millions of Volumes that ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of the curriculum which it would be so difficult to commend to an uninterested pupil by an appeal to simple utilitarian motives. On the other hand there clings to literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared with football or hockey. If the attitude of the teacher ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... a-slumb'ring lay, It chanced a bee did fly that way, After a dew, or dew-like shower, To tipple freely in a flower; For some rich flower, he took the lip Of Julia, and began to sip; But when he felt he suck'd from thence Honey, and in the quintessence, He drank so much he scarce could stir; So Julia took the pilferer. And thus surprised, as filchers use, He thus began himself t'excuse: 'Sweet lady-flower, I never brought Hither the least one thieving thought; But taking those rare lips of yours For some fresh, fragrant, luscious ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... 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 her ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... Dhammapada, containing the quintessence of Buddhist morality, and the Sutta-nipata, giving ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... out of 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, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers, and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... human purpose 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, but the foolish ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann |
