Having Substance Quotes & Sayings

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things that exist; observe, too, the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. — Marcus Aurelius

If there is any substance in what I have said, will not the great missionary bodies of India, to whom she owes a deep debt of gratitude for what they have done and are doing, do still better and serve the spirit of Christianity better by dropping the goal of proselytising while continuing their philanthropic work? — Mahatma Gandhi

[ ... ] the sacred - that which is immutable, inviolable and thus infinitely majestic - is in the very substance of our spirit and of our existence. The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means bindinghim again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason. — Frithjof Schuon

If the last to know he's an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. — Philip K. Dick

were spilt on his bib, Jane and Michael could tell that the substance in the spoon this time was milk. Then Barbara had her share, and she gurgled and licked the spoon twice. Mary Poppins then poured out another dose and solemnly took it herself. "Rum punch," she said, smacking her lips and corking the bottle. Jane's eyes and Michael's popped with astonishment, but they were not given much time to wonder, for Mary Poppins, having put the miraculous bottle on the mantelpiece, turned to them. "Now," she said, "spit-spot into bed." And she began to undress them. They noticed that whereas buttons and hooks had needed all sorts of coaxing from Katie Nanna, for Mary Poppins they flew apart almost at a look. In less than a minute they found themselves in bed and watching, by the dim light from the night-light, the rest of Mary Poppins's unpacking being performed. From the carpet bag she took out seven flannel nightgowns, four cotton ones, a pair of boots, a — P.L. Travers

She regained the street
happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax's letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself. — Jane Austen

I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I'm having sex with words in front of you. I'm playing around with them. I'm getting off. I'm trying to titillate you. There's this magical substance, language, that I'm laying out for you. Then you're going to fondle it. — Wayne Koestenbaum

if Substance is Life, is the Subject not Death? Insofar as, for Hegel, the basic feature of pre-subjective Life is the "spurious infinity" of the eternal reproduction of the life substance through the incessant movement of the generation and corruption of its elements - that is, the "spurious infinity" of a repetition without progress - the ultimate irony we encounter here is that Freud, who called this excess of death over life the "death drive," conceived it precisely as repetition, as a compulsion to repeat. — Slavoj Zizek

Strange people. The kind that leave the merest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense. — Patrick Modiano

pulling a great substance from a higher height whilst leaning on a slippery ground with the mentality of having the substance whilst standing is a thought of fantasy. You may only result in falling with the substance — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It's not that everything needs to have substance, but when nothing does then you know we're living in a bankrupt society, an artistically bankrupt society, and that's not okay. I think there's room for forms of entertainment that are very light and frivolous and fun, but when those forms of entertainment, forms of "art" if you will, become presented as something more than that, and are believed to be something more than that, then we've got a lot of problems. — Davey Havok

It was the sort of house that glows with substance and savoir vivre in those advertisements for the best Scotch. It had wonderful bones. — Robert A. Metzger

The more I think of it, the more our ideas, our idols and our so-called holy practices, and those of our visions which supposedly are ineffable, all seem to me to be engendered merely by the stirrings of the human machine, exactly as is the wind from our nostrils or from our netherparts, and as is our sweat and salty water from tears, or the white blood passed in love, or the muddy excrement of the body. It enraged me to think that man should so waste his own substance in construction of theories that were almost always pernicious, and should speak of chastity before having examined the whole machinery of sex; that he should debate the question of free will instead of pondering the thousand obscure reasons which, for example, cause you to blink if I suddenly point a stick at your eyes; or that he should talk of Hell before having looked more closely into the question of death. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths. — Jane Hirshfield

I will not sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance,complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend. — Helen Fielding

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

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance.
-Doc — Bryce Courtenay

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. — Thomas Merton

But he'd found that imaginary things were often the only items of real substance in people's lives. — Brandon Sanderson

Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part? — Victor Hugo

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms. — Richard Rohr

It's 103 comedians, or however many it is, and how would everyone tell it. It's enough people of substance that it makes you think of the people who aren't there that are alive. — Bob Saget

I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them. — Bernie Mac

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance. — Thomas Jefferson

If I was having a bad day, eating was like self-medicating. But if you abuse food, you still have to use that substance that you abuse every day. You have to learn to use it responsibly. — Al Roker

Deism" in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite. — Matthew Stewart

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. — Aesop

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor. — H.P. Lovecraft

You think the shadow is the substance. — Rumi

First, you believe that there is one intelligent substance, from which all things proceed. Second, you believe that this substance gives you everything you desire. And third, you relate yourself to it by a feeling of deep and profound gratitude. — Wallace D. Wattles

If I take a lick from so and so, I'm not going to get that many variations from it, because their phrases are just based on a scale. That's why I say Wes Montgomery has more substance than others. I find myself listening to the older players. You see one bar of theirs and you can get one hundred more licks out of it. — Emily Remler

You are only as authentic as the substance you have inside you. Having others take your examinations or doing your assignments and projects is to reduce the level of authenticity of your qualification as well as your personal brand. Master your chosen area of study to the highest level and demonstrate that you have full knowledge as a specialist. Let the depth of your knowledge make you sought after and respected. Define yourself and be authentic. — Archibald Marwizi

Most indigenous cultures also have elaborate theories about health and disease, seamlessly entwined with their mythological understanding of the universe and their place in it. Although the details vary, a frequent theme is that illness is caused by having too much or too little of a particular substance in the body. — Robert E. Adler

She was ... the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead. And everything having form or name-including God personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful-was her child, within her womb. — Joseph Campbell

You may have also experienced the damaged relationships, job loss, poor school performance, substance use, and other negative outcomes that can result from having bipolar disorder. Perhaps — Ruth C. White

The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all. And perhaps the fates had such a design, when, having stored Raleigh so richly with the substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to his expression the emphasis and sincerity of his action. — Henry David Thoreau

The important thing is that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at the bend of the Nile. For seven years I had longed for them, had dreamed of them, and it was an extraordinary moment when I at last found myself standing amongst them. They rejoiced at having me back and made a great fuss, and it was not long before I felt as though a piece of ice were melting inside of me, as though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone - that life warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land 'whose fishes die of the cold'. — Tayeb Salih

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be? — Farley Mowat

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens. — Roger Ebert

BEDE. But though there were four Evangelists, yet what they wrote is not so much four Gospels, as one true harmony of four books. (non occ.) For as two verses having the same substance, but different words and different metre, yet contain one and the same matter, so the books of the Evangelists, though four in number, yet contain one Gospel, teaching one doctrine of the Catholic faith. — Thomas Aquinas

When it shall be desired to enlighten man, let him always have truth laid before him. Instead of kindling his imagination by the idea of those pretended goods that a future state has in reserve for him, let him be solaced, let him be succoured; or, at least, let him be permitted to enjoy the fruit of his labour; let not his substance be ravaged from him by cruel imposts; let him not be discouraged from work, by finding all his labour inadequate to support his existence, let him not be driven into that idleness that will surely lead him on to crime: let him consider his present existence, without carrying his views to that which may attend him after his death: let his industry be excited; let his talents be rewarded; let him be rendered active, laborious, beneficent, and virtuous, in the world he inhabits; let it be shown to him that his actions are capable of having an influence over his fellow men, but not on those imaginary beings located in an ideal world. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning tehy have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for this is 'analysis paralysis.' ... That other people can often see things about you that you yourself canno see, even if those people are stupid ... That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. — David Foster Wallace

The parallelism, or denial of any causation between mind and body, derives basically, and fallaciously, from a theory of substances as having complete concepts that include everything that is true of them. — Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

I traded in my
freedom for
a needy, whiny
and defiant
four-year-old,
a junky girlfriend,
and a relationship
riddled with
someone else's
problems

Now, I stare
out of open
windows like
a wild mustang
craving open
fields

I clench my
crotch, where
my balls
used to be,
and I hum a
loathsome tune,
like an out-
of-work castrato
who's realized his
dreams of someday
having his own family
are gone — Phil Volatile

Man in his true nature is substance, soul, spirit. — Swami Vivekananda

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Marijuana is one of the least toxic substances in the whole pharmacopoeia — Lester Grinspoon

He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn't think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself. — Wendell Berry

Cease distracting your mind of things with little substance. — Nikki Rowe

Thou talk'st of nothing." "True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasty; Which is as thin of substance as the air; And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, Turning his face t the dew-dropping south. — William Shakespeare

Trust arises from the mind's instinctive feeling after fixed realities, after the substance of every shadow, the base of all appearance, the everlasting amid change. — James Martineau

Our breath is the most precious substance in our lives, and yet we totally take for granted when we exhale that our next breath will be there. If we did not take another breath, we would not last 3 minutes. Now if the Power that created us has given us enough breath to last for as long as we shall live, can we not trust that everything else we need will also be supplied? — Louise Hay

It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

plans have about as much substance as daydreams, — Jodi Angel

Some people are known, they have the platform and presence, but still remain irrelevant. They know you and what you do, but they don't need you or your offering. I see too many people with a platform but without substance, again this is not sustainable. Lack of substance can only relegate your talent or skill towards the league of the mediocre, if at all you become much by superficial branding then you will become the best of the worst. You don't have what it takes but you depend on your ability to sell substandard offerings to the market. It will not last for long, but quickly become irrelevant. — Archibald Marwizi

Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction. — Joseph Brodsky

He sat in the living room in the dark, an expert at waiting, a nineteen-year veteran of it, waiting for people who failed to appear, missed court dates because they forgot or didn't care, and took off. Nineteen years of losers, repeat offenders in and out of the system. Another one, that's all Louis was, slipping back into the life. — Elmore Leonard

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which you see, and out of their substance will make other things and again other things ... in order that the world may be ever new. — Marcus Aurelius

Show is not substance; realities govern wise men. — William Penn

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new. — Norman O. Brown

A catalyst is a substance which alters the velocity of a chemical reaction without appearing in the final products. — Wolfgang Ostwald

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots. — Stacy Schiff

The journey to freedom is paved by the substance of our character. — Erwin McManus

You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think. — Rhys Ifans

Horza recalled that the Culture's attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn't totally irrelevant - along with the person's background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them - but you didn't take their views seriously. — Iain Banks

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

19. Before the divine fire is introduced into the substance of the soul and united with it through perfect and complete purgation and purity, its flame, which is the Holy Spirit, wounds the soul by destroying and consuming the imperfections of its bad habits. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit, in which he disposes it for divine union and transformation in God through love. The very fire of love that afterward is united with the soul, glorifying it, is what previously assailed it by purging it, just as the fire that penetrates a log of wood is the same that first makes an assault on the wood, wounding it with the flame, drying it out, and stripping it of its unsightly qualities until it is so disposed that it can be penetrated and transformed into the fire. Spiritual writers call this activity the purgative way. — San Juan De La Cruz

Shame's hold over you leads you to believe you don't deserve to be rid of shame. As a result, you treat hope as if it were a contaminated substance. — Edward T. Welch

She closes her eyes but can't fall to sleep, and so instead she conjures up again the substance of the dream ... Awake it doesn't take, though; it feels like someone else's life and she like a voyeur, watching from the outside. — Paul Murray

In Illinois a pregnant woman who takes an illegal drug can be prosecuted for 'delivering a controlled substance to a minor.' This is an explicit recognition that the unborn is a person with rights of her own. But that same woman who is prosecuted and jailed for endangering her child is perfectly free to abort her child. In America today, it is illegal to harm your preborn child, but it is perfectly legal to kill him. — Randy Alcorn

Being satisfied with the little we have; academically, spiritually, financially, ecumenically or otherwise will prevent a lot of problems from coming to us, and our dependence in our abilities and talents will go as far as bringing us satisfaction in life. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know ... — Marvin Mudrick

Scheele, it was said, never forgot anything if it had to do with chemistry. He never forgot the look, the feel, the smell of a substance, or the way it was transformed in chemical reactions, never forgot anything he read, or was told, about the phenomena of chemistry. He seemed indifferent, or inattentive, to most things else, being wholly dedicated to his single passion, chemistry. It was this pure and passionate absorption in phenomena-noticing everything, forgetting nothing-that constituted Scheele's special strength. — Oliver Sacks

What is this, fundamentally? What is its nature and substance, its reason for being? What is it doing in the world? How long is it here for? — Marcus Aurelius

Life attacks us like a blind beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear. — Alvaro Mutis

Submission has nothing to do with equality. Men and women are equal, but we have been assigned different roles. Neither role is superior. The Trinity models this concept. The Persons in the Godhead are equal in power and in substance, but each as a different function. Submission is a position we willingly assume in obedience to Jesus and after His pattern. Submission is an attitude of humilty. Submission is being concerned about the interests of another rather than looking after our own interests. The world tells women that submission is foolish and renders us powerless. Scripture tells us that submission gives access to the power and protection of God. — Susan Hunt

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared. — Anthony Doerr