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Literary notes about intrinsically (AI summary)

The term "intrinsically" is used by authors to point to qualities or values that exist inherently in a subject, independent of external factors. In literature, it often qualifies descriptions or judgments by suggesting that a certain trait is an essential and unalterable characteristic of a person, object, or idea [1, 2, 3]. It can be deployed to stress the innate moral, aesthetic, or functional properties of something—implying that these features are integral to its true nature, rather than imposed from outside [4, 5]. At times, writers use the word to contrast the inherent features of entities with those that are merely circumstantial, thereby reinforcing a sense of authenticity or fundamental importance [6, 7].
  1. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of men.
    — from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle
  2. The word absolute is at present frequently used to denote that something can be predicated of a thing considered in itself and intrinsically.
    — from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
  3. But if courage intrinsically consists in the defiance of danger and pain, the life of the Indian is a continual exhibition of it.
    — from The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving
  4. [144] 7. “No pleasure is intrinsically bad: but the efficient causes of some pleasures bring with them a great many perturbations of pleasure.
    — from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius
  5. He harvests pleasures as he goes which intrinsically, as we have seen, may have the depth and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
  6. The idea A may be intrinsically exciting to us.
    — from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James
  7. What they do say is sufficiently interesting, as it is told in the form of a legend which is intrinsically curious and probably ancient.
    — from The Gypsies by Charles Godfrey Leland

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