Quintessential Quotes

• The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Attitude, Views, Order

  "Freedom from Fear". Book by Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991.

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• When I look at pictures when I was younger, I do the quintessential cringe.

  Rachel Roy

  Looks, Cringe

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• The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.

  Hal Rothman

  Las Vegas, Self, Cities

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• In my view, the lost art of listening and ignoring the patient as a human being is a quintessential failure of our health care.

  Bernard Lown

  Art, Views, Listening

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• Acting serves as the quintessential social lubricant and a device for protecting our interests and gaining advantage in every aspect of life.

  Marlon Brando

  Acting, Social, Advantage

  "The Technique of Acting". Book by Stella Adler, 1988.

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• We all experience pain and suffering, but it is not the quintessential nature of life. Just because the earth turns away from the sun and night occurs doesn't mean that the sun isn't always shining. It might be hard to see sometimes, but goodness and divine beauty can always be found if you adjust your vision just right.

  John Friend

  Pain, Mean, Night

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• Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Wisdom, Feelings, Aphorism

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• I don't like quintessential certitude.

  Louise Bogan

  Certain, Certitude

  Louise Bogan (1973). “What the woman lived: selected letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and as it were super-substantiated.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  May, Kind, Electricity

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1853). “The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions”, p.382

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• With a title like this-There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick-is there really a whole lot left to say? With cunning and quintessential stealth, with artful restraint, with whats fathering and foxy and filled with intelligence and wit, Michael Teig goes about making what seems to be invisible and unspeakable, the most palpable and important matter in the world.

  Dara Wier

  Important, Titles, World

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• Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Failure, Science, Errors

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.163, Harvard University Press

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• The quintessential expression of coffee is espresso.

  Ernesto Illy

  Coffee, Expression, Espresso

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• Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It's what's left behind that I like to photograph.

  Michael Kenna

  Photography, Memories, Garden

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• [T]he Super Bowl, the quintessential American creation. A dizzying mélange of brilliant entrepreneurship in an atmosphere of intense competition. It is the perfect show for the most intensely competitive culture in this solar system.

  Robert Klein

  Perfect, Competition, Atmosphere

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• The best aphorisms are.... portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Feelings, Intellectual, Weak Points

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• It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

  Bell Hooks

  Romantic Love, Expression, Want

  Bell Hooks, Cornel West (1991). “Breaking bread: insurgent Black intellectual life”, South End Pr

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• The quintessential revolution is that of spirit. Without this, the forces which produce the inequalities of the old order will continue to operate.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Order, Revolution, Spirit

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• It's the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus's brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.

  Barry S. Strauss

  Sports, Intelligent, Sea

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• Everything in life is drawing, if you want. Drawing is quintessential to knowing the self. Art that survives from one generation to the next is the art that actually carries something that tells society about self.

  Richard Tuttle

  Art, Self, Drawing

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• Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

  John Berger

  Village, Emigration, Metropolis

  John Berger (2014). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos”, p.45, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I think Robert Plant is the quintessential frontman - just the way he moves. His voice is superhuman.

  Taylor Momsen

  Moving, Thinking, Voice

  Interview With Marah Eakin, music.avclub.com. March 10, 2011.

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• My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.

  Jacques Pepin

  Mother, Thinking, People

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• The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Unique, Zest, Self

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• The quintessential bad - luck position. Pucks can go off bodies, skates, bounce into the net.

  Mike Liut

  Hockey, Luck, Puck

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• People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.

  Garrett Hardin

  Attitude, Technology, People

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