These quintessential quotes will inspire you. Quintessential represents the most perfect or typical example of a quality or class.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging quintessential quotes, quintessential sayings, and quintessential proverbs.
Best 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
- “When I look at pictures when I was younger, I do the quintessential cringe.” ~ Rachel Roy
- “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
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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
- “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 serves as the quintessential social lubricant and a device for protecting our interests and gaining advantage in every aspect of life.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet’s development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg ‘s invention of the printing press.” ~ L. Neil Smith
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“I was your quintessential nerd in high school.” ~ Neal Boortz
- “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
- “Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.” ~ Hayden Carruth
- “My personal assessment is that Dr. King is the greatest American we have ever produced. I can argue for Lincoln, I can argue for FDR, but for my money, King is the greatest American we have ever produced. His only weapon was love. He transforms a nation, transforms the world with one weapon and that of course being again the weapon of love. So that for me, King is the quintessential example of everything that I could ever want to be in my lifetime.” ~ Tavis Smiley
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“Patience was not something that came naturally to me, but in cooking it is the quintessential skill.” ~ Gail Simmons
- “War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself, as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser; rather, peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.” ~ Gustav Heinemann
- “I feel like if you’re a girl in the South, you know ‘Gone with the Wind’ better than anything. Scarlett O’Hara is such a quintessential Southern woman.” ~ Leslie Bibb
- “Normally you’ll have a structure to a song. You’ll have an intro to a verse to a pre-chorus to a chorus, kinda repeat that, maybe there’s a bridge, then you’ll go out on a chorus – that’s the quintessential song structure – sometimes you might do a fake-out, re-do a pre-chorus but the chorus doesn’t come until later, but for the most part you follow these tried and true structures.” ~ Frank Iero
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“[My] dream writers room: “‘Naked City.’ Because it still holds up as the absolutely quintessential New York pure cop procedural.”” ~ Dick Wolf
- “Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart’s territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson—sharpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love—the broken fragments, the fallen leaves—and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out—she’s driving down your street.” ~ Barbara Hamby
- “For me, the Dennis Wilson story is a quintessential You Must Remember This story because it’s one of these stories that people never talk about, don’t really think about, and it’s forgotten within this major thing that is thought to be this cataclysmic event of the 20th century.” ~ Karina Longworth
- “Playing normal is hard; especially playing normal that’s not you. The biggest challenge in playing Alicia is trying to make a teenage girl seem fully formed and not the quintessential moody teenager with a quippy, sassy line here and there.” ~ Alycia Debnam Carey
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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
- “I didn’t want to put myself, or anyone else, asleep with another quintessential Mark Kozelek album.” ~ Mark Kozelek
- “David Bowie is the quintessential English gentleman and, of course, a musical and generational institution. I only played support for him for one night (not a whole tour) but he was incredibly gracious and generous toward me and I’ve certainly never forgotten it.” ~ Brooke Fraser
- “My father was the quintessential husband and dad.” ~ Sidney Poitier
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“The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive.” ~ Joan Fontcuberta
- “I’m not leaving New York. And neither is anyone else. We’re here. We are quintessential Americans – we’re not only American, but New York-American.” ~ Lou Reed
- “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
- “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
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“The human rights we are to discuss here at Vienna are . . . the quintessential values through which we affirm together that we are a single human community.” ~ Radhika Coomaraswamy
- “[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
- “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
- “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
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“The quintessential bad – luck position. Pucks can go off bodies, skates, bounce into the net.” ~ Mike Liut
- “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
- “On June 22, 2008, at the age of 71, an American revolutionary died. He was a bona fide genius, an outspoken critich, a literary giant and an unprecedented visionary. For 50 years he entertained, challenged and amazed not only my generation, but also ones before mine and well after. He was sensational, brilliant, iconic and unique – the quintessential individual. He was my lifelong hero. His name was George Carlin.” ~ Corey Taylor
- “Thank God I have four sons. The mother/daughter relationship is one of mankind’s great mysteries, and for womankind, it can be hellaciously complicated. My mother and I are quintessential examples of the rewards and frustrations, and the joys and infuriations it can yield.” ~ Melissa Gilbert
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“I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.” ~ Gerhard Richter
- “Jay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature’s wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It’s a book about a new way to think.” ~ Janine Benyus
- “Instant enlightenment. A quintessential modernism, culture and religion accommodated to the age of fast food and bumper stickers. But psyche and spirit are not so exempt from the natural domain that they can simply produce self-change instantaneously, on demand. Wisdom precipitates through a notoriously slow apparatus of retorts and flasks, and it has to find receptive ground only in a properly seasoned mind.” ~ Kenny Smith
- “Barry Crump wrote a lot of books and they were really special. They were kind of the quintessential, mild for the most part, kind of southern man, kind of the true heart of what it meant to be a Kiwi kind of farmer; very kind of outdoor man living off the land. That kind of thing, you don’t see so much anymore these days with everyone being metrosexual and lattes and laptops.” ~ Rhys Darby
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“The quintessential expression of coffee is espresso.” ~ Ernesto Illy
- “I think Robert Plant is the quintessential frontman – just the way he moves. His voice is superhuman.” ~ Taylor Momsen
- “Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.” ~ John Berger
- “Remember that for every technique you think you can fall back on, there is a counter for it, or there are times when it cannot be used. When real battle comes, you must remember that some things will not be applicable. Don’t think that any one technique is quintessential.” ~ Masaaki Hatsumi
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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
- “If it comes to a question of law, the charges they brought against me – the Espionage Act – is called the quintessential political crime. A political crime, in legal terms, is defined as any crime against a state, as opposed to against an individual. Assassination, for example, is not a political crime because you’ve killed a person, an individual, and they’ve been harmed; their family’s been harmed. But the state itself, you can’t be extradited for harming it.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
- “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
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“I like producing but acting is the quintessential me, and I’m probably better at that than I am at anything. My heart has always been in the movies.” ~ Morgan Freeman
- “Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.” ~ William Rounseville Alger
- “I don’t like quintessential certitude.” ~ Louise Bogan
- “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
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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
- “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
- “The only rule was that the stuff had to be funny and pretty short. To me, the quintessential Army Man joke was one of John Swartzwelder’s: ‘They can kill the Kennedys. Why can’t they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?’ It’s a horrifying idea juxtaposed with something really banal-and yet there’s a kind of logic to it. It’s illuminating because it’s kind of how Americans see things: Life’s a big jumble, but somehow it leads to something I can consume. I love that.” ~ George Meyer
- “I think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew – the writer, the producer, etcetera – and to have that, he needs money.” ~ Roger Corman
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“My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that’s both ugly and lovely at the same time.” ~ Joshua Mohr
- “I’d had the quintessential liberal arts experience, and I came out of college not having a clue of what to do.” ~ John Wesley
- “The courage to press on regardless – regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us – is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor.” ~ John C. Bogle
- “The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!” ~ Evelyn Waugh
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“The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.” ~ Sara Shepard
- “I enjoy playing a quintessential antihero. There’s something therapeutic about playing such characters. I know it sounds corny but I feel like I learn about myself when I play that characters.” ~ Vin Diesel
- “Anger is the quintessential individual-signature emotion: I am what makes me mad.” ~ Gina Barreca
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“Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother’s and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.” ~ Judith Viorst
- “The future was and remains the quintessential American art form. Other nations sit back and let their futures happen; we construct ours. We can let the future happen, or take the trouble to imagine it. We can imagine it dark or bright – and in the long run, that’s how it will be.” ~ David Gelernter
- “I always think of “Popeye” and “Barney Google” as quintessential comic strips in that old rollicky, slapstick way we’ve sort of lost.” ~ Bill Watterson
