Substance

Famous quotes containing the word substance:

    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)

    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)

    What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)