Essence

Her saying seemed a commonplace at the time, the essence of its meaning escaping us; but one sees now that it contained a principle which lifted it above that and made it great and fine.

Is not general incivility the very essence of love?” “Oh, yes!—of that kind of love which I suppose him to have felt.

The wearer’s essence does not change, only his seeming.” She made it sound a simple thing, and easy.

Therefore should I Be but the essence of deformity, A coward, did my very eyelids wink At speaking out what I have dared to think.

I experienced that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object.

On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf.

Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!

They met “in the common belief that there exists a Divine Essence in the universe.” Every faith with more than a million followers was represented, and they reached a surprisingly immediate agreement on the statement of their common goal: “We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions.

And I didn’t get through any of that because I was brilliant at Defense Against the Dark Arts, I got through it all because — because help came at the right time, or because I guessed right — but I just blundered through it all, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing — STOP LAUGHING!”The bowl of murtlap essence fell to the floor and smashed.

However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter.

But, now, why do you say that?” “Well,” Bayta’s eyes misted with thought as she curled her bare toes into the white softness of the rug and nestled her little chin in one plump hand, “it seems to me that the whole essence of Seldon’s plan was to create a world better than the ancient one of the Galactic Empire.

Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort?

Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition—they are but another form of the phrase ‘to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.’ A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper time.

The essence of what we're committed to destroy.

It is an additional instance of his egoism, this artfulness and self-limitation in intercourse with his equals—every star is a similar egoist; he honours himself in them, and in the rights which he concedes to them, he has no doubt that the exchange of honours and rights, as the essence of all intercourse, belongs also to the natural condition of things.

He couldn't capture the essence of the memory, its quality of beauty and transcendence, but it seemed perfectly real.

Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?

The nations took Attila, who was doomed to destroy them, for a conqueror similar to other conquerors, and it was necessary for both to reveal their missions, that they might be known and acknowledged; one was compelled to say, ‘I am the angel of the Lord’; and the other, ‘I am the hammer of God,’ in order that the divine essence in both might be revealed.” “Then,” said Villefort, more and more amazed, and really supposing he was speaking to a mystic or a madman, “you consider yourself as one of those extraordinary beings whom you have mentioned?” “And why not?” said Monte Cristo coldly.

‘Exactly as is a mother’s joy when her baby smiles for the first time into her eyes, so is God’s joy when one of His children turns and prays to Him for the first time, with all his heart!’ This is what that poor woman said to me, almost word for word; and such a deep, refined, truly religious thought it was—a thought in which the whole essence of Christianity was expressed in one flash—that is, the recognition of God as our Father, and of God’s joy in men as His own children, which is the chief idea of Christ.

Your love each other is nonsense.”—“Well,” replied Monseigneur Welcome, without contesting the point, “if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as the pearl in the oyster.” Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics—all those profundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness; destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses, which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to cause stars to blaze forth there.

There was little sound, and none agreeable save the whir of the ship’s sewing machine at which Smee sat, ever industrious and obliging, the essence of the commonplace, pathetic Smee.

If you hit a monster just right, you can dissolve them, send their essence back to Tartarus.” “Tartarus?” “A huge abyss in the Underworld, where the worst monsters come from.

I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life.

Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

To make the Body and the Spirit one With all right things, till no thing live in vain From morn to noon, but in sweet unison With every pulse of flesh and throb of brain The soul in flawless essence high enthroned, Against all outer vain attack invincibly bastioned, Mark with serene impartiality The strife of things, and yet be comforted, Knowing that by the chain causality All separate existences are wed Into one supreme whole, whose utterance Is joy, or holier praise!

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistering on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum.

The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.

As wine retains the perfume of its cask, I retain the essence of my most ancient genesis, and that is the seed of conscience.

Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me—something seizing, surprising and revolting—this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.

When dawn came and the waiting seemed at an end, he fell asleep, and was vexed to have been caught off his guard, to have been aroused by Verona’s entrance and her agitated “Oh, what is it, Dad?” His wife was awake, her face sallow and lifeless in the morning light, but now he did not compare her with Tanis; she was not merely A Woman, to be contrasted with other women, but his own self, and though he might criticize her and nag her, it was only as he might criticize and nag himself, interestedly, unpatronizingly, without the expectation of changing—or any real desire to change—the eternal essence.

“The essence of a detective story,” I said, “is to have a rare poison—if possible something from South America, that nobody has ever heard of—something that one obscure tribe of savages use to poison their arrows with.

It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life.

“And time is of the essence.

The wearer’s essence does not change, only his seeming.” She made it sound a simple thing, and easy.

The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting.

All of this, a thousandfold and colourful, had always been there, the sun and the moon had always shone, always rivers had roared and bees had buzzed, but in former times all of this had been nothing more to Siddhartha than a fleeting, deceptive veil before his eyes, looked upon in distrust, destined to be penetrated and destroyed by thought, since it was not the essential existence, since this essence lay beyond, on the other side of, the visible.

Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm.

Our purer essence then will overcome Their noxious vapour, or inured not feel, Or changed at length, and to the place conformed In temper and in nature, will receive Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain; This horror will grow mild, this darkness light; Besides what hope the never-ending flight Of future days may bring, what chance, what change Worth waiting, since our present lot appears For happy though but ill, for ill not worst, If we procure not to ourselves more woe.” Thus Belial with words clothed in reason’s garb Counseled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth, Not peace; and after him thus Mammon spake: “Either to disinthrone the King of Heaven We war, if war be best, or to regain Our own right lost: him to unthrone we then May hope, when everlasting Fate shall yield To fickle Chance, and Chaos judge the strife.

He was one of the few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the unsmiling gravity which is the essence of quixotic humour; it seemed to him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is the characteristic of his translation.

Those beings, in whatever their essence might be supposed to consist, were parts of the great system of the universe, and parts too productive of the most important effects.