Substance

Famous quotes containing the word substance:

    But they that hold God to be [an incorporeal substance] ... do absolutely make God to be nothing at all. But how? Were they atheists? No. For though by ignorance of the consequence they said that which was equivalent to atheism, yet in their hearts they thought God a substance ... So that this atheism by consequence is a very easy thing to be fallen into, even by the most godly men of the church.
    Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

    True, I talk of dreams,
    Which are the children of an idle brain,
    Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
    Which is as thin of substance as the air,
    And more inconstant than the wind, who woos
    Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
    And being angered, puffs away from thence,
    Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.
    Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)