distil QUOTES

1 " The historian's rightful task is to distil experience as a medicinal warning for the future generations, not to distil a drug. "

― B.H. Liddell Hart

2 " Doctor Gilyard was right, Juliet and I do have a lot in common. She lost her mother, I lost my mother. She lost her father, I lost my father. She had to start again, I had to start again. She had to pretend to be someone else, I had to pretend to be someone else. But where she was better for it, I was worse. Where she used what happened to make her stronger, I held on to it. I let it distil into something filthy and black. And I hated her for that.
Hated her. "

― Tanya Byrne , Heart-Shaped Bruise

3 " These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults. Which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings in all kinds, wherewith this ancient sect has honoured the world, shall immediately find, from the whole thread and tenor of them, that the ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers; and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms themselves have made. "

― Jonathan Swift , A Tale of a Tub and Other Works