Material is anything made of matter, constituted of one or more substances. Wood, cement, hydrogen, air and water are all examples of materials. Sometimes the term "material" is used more narrowly to refer to substances or components with certain physical properties that are used as inputs to production or manufacturing. In this sense, materials are the parts required to make something else, from buildings and art to stars and computers.
Read more about Material: Raw Materials and Processing, Some Examples of Raw Materials
Famous quotes containing the word material:
“Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A second-class mind dealing with third-class material is hardly a necessity of life.”
—Harold Laski (1893–1950)