0 being the most typical example or most important part of something:
1 representing the most perfect or most typical example of something:
Helping others whom one has assumed no prior obligation to help is the quintessential way to make anyone's existence significant to some degree.
Her poem's stammering, frayed edges seek to chart a ' ' quintessential clarity of inarticulation ' ' (95).
Unquestionably, the development of population as an object of study owes its genesis to that quintessential sign of modernity: the modern census.
Organized labor was a quintessential aging social movement by 1972.
The quintessential ' stationary rebels ' are secessionist\regionalist movements.
It sets the scene for some quintessential entities such as ' scientifically defined ' social classes, international capitalism, and colonial bourgeoisie.
Physics, after all, is a quintessential^ modernist endeavor, at least as ordinarily understood.
The traditional altars that used to be the quintessential location for praying are never used.