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)
“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)
“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)