quiddity

Ample quotations from Hardwick allow her restless quiddity to come through.

From New York Times ● Nov. 3, 2021

And one of the few hopeful things I observed, in an otherwise grim time, was that, despite the advancing creep of retail sameness that long predated a pandemic, plenty of quiddity remained.

From New York Times ● Sep. 15, 2021

And that may have sounded like a compliment to a playful media class, but quiddity is identity.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 3, 2020

As always, Herzog tries to remold his subject into an honorary Herzogian, all quirk and quiddity.

From The New Yorker ● May 3, 2019

I think that he is right, and that the profitable study of a man is the study which regards him as an oddity, not a quiddity.

From Romance Two Lectures by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

Managers, doormen and valets, with their quiddities and quirks, help set the tone for the singular ecosystem that is any given apartment building, as Mr. Soffer, the banker, explained.

From New York Times ● Mar. 23, 2020

“When you homogenize a city, you destroy its feeling of urbanity,” Ms. Schulman said, referring to the banks and drugstores and chains retailers steadily wallpapering over the city’s indispensable quiddities.

From New York Times ● Feb. 25, 2020

Whatever is going on, whatever misalliances and misdelving of quiddities we get into, the human heart is still beating in the same way in everybody’s chest.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 2, 2016

Indeed, all his personal and artistic quiddities are backed by a natural robustness of temperament which smacks of his native Lancashire, still strongly accented in his speech.

From Time Magazine Archive

Essences, quiddities, virtues residing in things, were accepted as a bonâ fide explanation of phaenomena.

From Auguste Comte and Positivism by John Stuart Mill