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/kwɪntˈɛsəns/ Listen

noun

Quintessence n.

The fifth or last and highest essence or power in a natural body. See Ferment oils, under Ferment. (Obs.) Note: The ancient Greeks recognized four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. The Pythagoreans added a fifth and called it nether, the fifth essence, which they said flew upward at creation and out of it the stars were made. The alchemists sometimes considered alcohol, or the ferment oils, as the fifth essence.

Hence: An extract from anything, containing its rarest virtue, or most subtle and essential constituent in a small quantity; pure or concentrated essence. "Let there be light, said God; and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep."

The most characteristic form or most perfect example of some type of object.

verb

Quintessence v. t. To distil or extract as a quintessence; to reduce to a quintessence. (R.) "Truth quintessenced and raised to the highest power."

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Etymology of 'Quintessence'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Quintessence" Quotes from Famous Books

... Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The book is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of Elizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort of delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another of enthusiastic ...

— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... men, yet that hath in its bosom a more exquisite and refined enmity against God, and so the more spiritual and purified it be from grosser corruptions, it is the more active and powerful against God, because it is, as it were, the very spirit and quintessence of enmity. You see it, 1 Cor i., how the wisdom of God is foolishness to the wisdom of the world, and then again, that the wisdom of the world is the greatest folly to the only wise God. Men, that have many natural advantages ...

— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... I think, there's something in what Shaw teaches about no moral principles being quite fixed. Have you ever read The Quintessence of Ibsenism? Of course he went ...

— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... 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 death; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality ...

— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... that Aristotle's art goes but little to the composition of a pathetic tragedy. In his last drama, "Arminius," he extravagantly scatters his panegyrics on its fifteen predecessors; but of the present one he has the most exalted notion: it is the quintessence of Scudery! An ingenious critic calls it "The downfall of mediocrity!" It is amusing to listen to this blazing preface:—"At length, reader, nothing remains for me but to mention the great Arminius which I now present to you, and by which I have resolved to close ...

— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

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