Quintessence

Famous quotes containing the word quintessence:

“If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is 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 (b. 1916)

“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)