Quintessence Quotes

The Holy Eucharist is the perfect expression of the love of Jesus Christ for man since It is the quintessence of all the mysteries of His Life. ~ Peter Julian Eymard

The snapshot has no pretense or ambition. Innocence is the quintessence of the snapshot. I wish to distinguish between innocence and ignorance. Innocence is one of the highest forms of being and ignorance is one of the lowest. ~ Lisette Model

It is, I believe, the primary charm of poetry to give the lesson of mirage, that is, to show the fragile and vibrant movement of creation, in which the word is in a certain way human quintessence, prayer. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

You may train for a long time, but if you merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet, learning karate is not very different from learning a dance. You will never have reached the heart of the matter; you will have failed to grasp the quintessence of karate-do. ~ Gichin Funakoshi

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Sin is the quintessence of evil; it has made all the evils that there are & is itself worse than all evils it has made. It is so evil that it is impossible to make it good or lovely by all the arts that can be used. ~ Ralph Venning

Taste may be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it. ~ Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine.

Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this "life begins at the moment of conception" business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of "religious faith." In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature. ~ Sam Harris

She breathes in as I breathe out and her lungs fill with the air that was inside of me. I love her completely and I love giving her life as she gives me life. I breathe in her quintessence and it's cathartic. ~ Ella Dominguez

Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence. ~ Paracelsus

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice. ~ Emil Cioran

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience. ~ Rollo May

I think virtue is the quintessence of perfection, and the One who created it definitely stands beyond that value. Virtues like honesty, loyalty and courtesy, do not have to be completely defined by their relation to extrinsic things. Even if they are not realized by actions, their good value remains. ~ Aishah Madadiy

All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

they contain the essence of the plant from which they were extracted. Actually, the term essential oil is short for the original term 'quintessential oil'. This is based on the Aristotelian idea that all matter is made up of four main elements (water, earth, air, and fire). Additionally, there was the fifth element, the quintessence, which was considered to be in spirit form or rather life force. Evaporation and distillation were viewed as ways of extracting the spirit from the plant. This has been reflected to even today's world where we can see the word 'spirits' being used to describe distilled alcoholic drinks such as eau de vie, whiskey and brandy. In the current days, the idea has been let go of since we know that essential oils are actually ~ Matt Hall

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth. ~ Brooks Atkinson

Tammy, werewulves act in ways that are pleasing only to themselves. They behave without a conscious... They are sick monsters who have permanently lost their self-control. Their intentions and motivations are never clear; they slaughter flocks and herds yet eat nothing. They are the quintessence of evil, hence the title "demon". And who really wants demons around? ~ Melanie Fair

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated ... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce. ~ Eric Bentley

As all things come from and are imbued with the quintessence of Spirit, all things are holy and alive in their own right - and anything that has a physical existence contains within it a unique personality, energy, and expression of Spirit. ~ Mat Auryn

The classical anthropological question, What is man? - "how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!" - is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture. ~ Paul Goodman

Among the myrtles the mantids moved, lightly, carefully, swaying slightly, the quintessence of evil. They were lank and green, with chinless faces and monstrous globular eyes, frosty gold, with an expression of intense, predatory madness in them. The crooked arms, with their fringes of sharp teeth, would be raised in mock supplication to the insect world, so humble, so fervent, trembling slightly when a butterfly flew too close. ~ Gerald Durrell

For I am every dead thing In whom love wrought new alchemy For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not. ~ John Donne

Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity. ~ Agnes Repplier

One of the miracles of the airplane is that it plunges a man directly into the heart of mystery. You are a biologist studying, through your porthole, the human ant-hill, scrutinizing objectively those towns seated in their plain at the centre of their highways which go off like the spokes of a wheel and, like arteries, nourish them with the quintessence of the fields. A needle trembles on your manometer, and this green clump below you becomes a universe. You are the prisoner of a greensward in a slumbering park. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

The solutions put forth by imperialism are the quintessence of simplicity ... When they speak of the problems of population and birth, they are in no way moved by concepts related to the interests of the family or of society ... Just when science and technology are making incredible advances in all fields, they resort to technology to suppress revolutions and ask the help of science to prevent population growth. In short, the peoples are not to make revolutions, and women are not to give birth. This sums up the philosophy of imperialism. ~ Fidel Castro

The quintessence of the word of God is Christ. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage. ~ Thomas Merton

John Stuart was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly minded man of mush in striking contrast to his steel-edged father. ~ Murray Rothbard

...the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth. ~ Emile Zola

I think some people would understand the quintessence of sanctifying grace if they could be black about twenty-four hours. ~ Amanda Smith

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. ~ Edward Weston

Even in rainier areas, where dust is less inexorable and submits to brooms and rags, it is generally detested, because dust is not organized and is therefore considered aesthetically bankrupt. Our light is not kind to faint diffuse spreading things. Our soft comfortable light flatters carefully organized, formally structured things like wedding cakes with their scrolls and overlapping flounces.
It takes the mortal storms of a star to transform dust into something incandescent. Our dust, shambling and subtractive as it is, would be radiant, if we were close enough to such a star, to that deep and dangerous light, and we would be ravished by the vision - emerald shreds veined in gold, diamond bursts fraught with deep-red flashes, aqua and violet and icy-green astral manifestations, splintery blinking harbor of light, dust as it can be, the quintessence of dust. ~ Amy Leach

Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels. ~ Thomas Nashe

Appalachia is still, for American musicians, a kind of fountain of youth we always go back to, the old home place to a group of artists who represent the quintessence of American independence, fortitude, genius, and madness. ~ Paul Burch

At incredible velocity and accelerating exponentially, the concentrated volume of quintessence escaped, transforming as it did so into a state known as phantom energy and following the artificial line of egress that had been provided. ~ Alan Dean Foster

Thus, being the only begotten son of method and resolve, Op Oloop was the most perfect of human machines, the most notable object of self-discipline that Buenos Aires had ever seen. When everything in life from the important universal phenomena to one's own trivial, individual failures has been recorded and anotated since puberty, it's fair to say that one's system of classification will have been honed, condensed to their most perfect quintessence. Or else deified into a great, overarching, methodological hierarchy. Method's very greatness, of course, is revealed in its sovereignty over the trivial! ~ Juan Filloy

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. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Having been gathered in stages by an immense array of coupled collectors located on the other side of the planet, a tremendously compact volume of a type of dark energy known as quintessence had been accumulated at the center of the planet. Held in place inside a roiling molten metal core by the frozen world's powerful magnetic field, ~ Alan Dean Foster

The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything. ~ Thomas Berry

That strange premature genius Chatterton has couched in one line the quintessence of what Voltaire has said in many pages: Reason, a thorn in Revelation's side. ~ Horace Walpole

These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers' faults. Which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings in all kinds, wherewith this ancient sect has honoured the world, shall immediately find, from the whole thread and tenor of them, that the ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers; and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms themselves have made. ~ Jonathan Swift

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering
a hell of boredom. ~ Victor Hugo

The doctors spoke of amusements and distractions; but with whom, and with what, could they possibly suppose that he might amuse or enjoy himself? Had he not outlawed himself from society? Did he know one man capable of trying to lead a life such as his own, a life entirely confined to contemplation and to dreams? Did he know one man capable of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, one man whose soul was sufficiently finely crafted to understand Mallarmé and to love Verlaine? ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism. ~ John Carroll

For the transcendental quintessence of good music can never be found or felt in the warring breast of the beast. And he who is incapable of gratitude and compassion is incapable of being good and doing good. ~ Mariano Ngan

I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz . that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others. ~ Susan Choi

By cultivating an interest in a few good books which contain the result of the toil or the quintessence of the genius of some of the most gifted thinkers of the world, we need not live on the marsh and in the mists. The slopes and ridges invite us. ~ Thomas Starr King

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation
Prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king
And queen moult no feather. I have of late--but
Wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
Custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
With my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
Excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
O'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
With golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
Me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
Express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
World! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
What is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
Me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
You seem to say so. ~ William Shakespeare

Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression – yet it was probably that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Failure is the quintessence to triumph. Fear is a necessity. Whatever is needed in one's life to maintain the universal principle of Chaos should be seasoned and not discouraged. Regardless of whether it's crazy, it's one's subjective reality. That makes it beautiful. ~ Lionel Suggs

The sum and substance of my teaching is this: Don't be dishonest to your vital breath; worship that only, abide in that only, accept it as yourself. And when you worship in this manner, it can lead you anywhere, to any heights- this is the quintessence of my talks. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The human mind and body are truly extraordinary. They are the quintessence of excellence in motion. We talk, touch, see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. We dream, aspire, and become. All that we are is mind and body and spirit - that is our universe. ~ Lorii Myers

Illusion close to reality was your love, you certainly are quintessential with your licks and promises. ~ Na

From a clear knowledge of the Bhagavad-gita all the goals of human existence become fulfilled. Bhagavad-gita is the manifest quintessence of all the teachings of the Vedic scriptures. ~ Adi Shankara

In its own unique and indefinable manner, music indirectly communicates the joys of life along with the pains and terrors overwhelming humanity. The universal language of music quantities the human experience, its range of variation encapsulates the scale of humankind's exuberance for living as well as expresses our apprehension of suffering and death. Because music articulates the quintessence of life and yokes a myriad of human events into an expressible format, music is a critical act. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When a woman tilts her head to fasten an earring she so often becomes for the moment a quintessence of herself, he thinks. She becomes a thrilling foreign language. ~ Glenn Haybittle

I felt as though I were plunging into something new and quite abnormal. I had the strangest and most vivid impressions, such as I had never before known in the mountains. There was something unnatural in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. I smiled to myself at the paltriness of our efforts, for I could stand apart and watch myself making these efforts. But all sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity--these were not the mountains I knew: they were the mountains of my dreams (pp.206-207). ~ Maurice Herzog

Hindu Dharma is the quintessence of our national life, hold fast to it if you want your country to survive, or else you would be wiped out in three generations. ~ Swami Vivekananda

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshakable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. ~ Jay Griffiths

To see the Thing itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism ... This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant presentation - not interpretation. ~ Edward Weston

Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements - a quintessence - that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man's spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that's not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there's a little starlight in each of us. ~ Lisa Kleypas