Quintessence

Famous quotes containing the word quintessence:

“Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
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 (1572–1631)

“For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.”
—Amy Lowell (1874–1925)

“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 (1717–1797)