Words similar to quintessence

Example sentences for: quintessence

How can you use “quintessence” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

These kinds of unorthodox responses to rock's creation myth were fresh enough to make me expect more from the later chapters than a gloss on punk as simply rock's "quintessence" of "stunning ugliness."
Although the four-elements paradigm remained robust throughout antiquity and through the Middle Ages (during which a mystical tradition emerged proposing a fifth element, ruling the others, the socalled quintessence ), atomism fell out of favor for nearly two millennia until the quantitative philosophy of the early Enlightenment created a conceptual environment friendly to the metamorphosis of alchemy, through the chemical experiments of Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Antoine Lavoisier and others, into something like the chemistry we were all taught in high school.
Since then the myth has persisted that here encoded in these quasi-representational forms was the quintessence of thought, the eternal Platonic ideal, the Jungian Ur- symbol underlying all human cogitation--and by extrapolation, speech--the (al)lure of the fabulous (Far) East playing an obvious role.
Renoir's portraits of children, which have a kindred prelapsarian innocence, now seem the quintessence of cute.