Substance

Famous quotes containing the word substance:

    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)

    All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.
    Doris Lessing (b. 1919)

    Ah, to build, to build!
    That is the noblest art of all the arts.
    Painting and sculpture are but images,
    Are merely shadows cast by outward things
    On stone or canvas, having in themselves
    No separate existence. Architecture,
    Existing in itself, and not in seeming
    A something it is not, surpasses them
    As substance shadow.
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)