Solvent Quotes & Sayings

Because its hard to realize now that that was the end of the great depression, you know. All of a sudden all of this is in front of me and I'm solvent, you know. I'm making some money and I know where my next meal is coming from, and I have a new pair of shoes and that's it. — Robert McCloskey

If rather than setting the minimum balance as the lowest possible amount, so we keep people in debt for as long as possible, we raise the minimum payment and encourage people to pay off their credit cards, we're going to make less money, but we're going to have costumers that are more solvent. — Richard Thaler

She didn't want to date anyone.
A relationship, if indeed she decided to cultivate one, was three years down the road. Minimum. She would never make the mistake ... [to] depend on someone else for emotional and financial support. First, she would make certain she was solvent, solid, and secure. And then, if and when she chose, she would think about sharing her life. — Nora Roberts

He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection. — Ayn Rand

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope. — George Eliot

I urge you to live within your means. One cannot spend more than one earns and remain solvent. I promise you that you will then be happier than you would be if you were constantly worrying about how to make the next payment on nonessential debt. — Thomas S. Monson

Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both of their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning. — Paolo Giordano

Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family,and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch.Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. — Patrick O'Brian

Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with a neighbor. — Simon Baron-Cohen

Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul. — Paul Hoffman

Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the disinfectant of a hearty laugh - there Taft was sent. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Would to God I were rid of this nether millstone within me, this hateful body of death. Blessed be the name of the Lord, the disease is not incurable, the Saviour's precious blood is the universal solvent, and me, even me, it will effectually soften, till my heart melts as wax before the fire. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material. — Alfred North Whitehead

Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness. — Susan Sontag

Politicians will promise some pretty ridiculous things. They will promise a chicken in every pot. They'll promise that they'll keep Social Security solvent. They'll promise drugs for old people. They'll promise lots of stuff. But it doesn't come near the kind of promises that religion makes. The Mormons promise that if you're good while you're on Earth, you get to rule over your own planet in the afterlife. Now, there's an entitlement that goes a little bit beyond prescription drugs for old people. — Bill Maher

The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world. — Garet Garrett

You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure. — Jay McInerney

One dominant response to the Great War was "disillusion" and a repudiation of principles named by such lofty abstractions as Honor, Patriotism, Virtue, and Beauty. It is easy to find examples of that solvent at work. But in another sense, the response to the war, especially on the continent, and most particularly in Germany, was just the opposite: it was what we might call the re-enchantment, the re-illusioning, of the world by means of a wholesale embrace of empty abstractions. The re-enchantment was malign, to be sure, but it was also thoroughgoing. Nazism was the most poisonous effort.It was, as [Modris] Eksteins puts it, "an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world." This is where kitsch comes in. — Roger Kimball

Heat is a universal solvent, melting out of things their power of resistance, and sucking away and removing their natural strength with its fiery exhalations so that they grow soft, and hence weak, under its glow. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Fear is the glue that keeps you stuck. Faith is the solvent that sets you free. — Shannon L. Alder

Mr. Walsh?" a woman's voice said. "Can I get a comment, Mr. Walsh?"
"That's not about me, is it?" I said.
"No, my client. He's on trial for killing his business partner and dissolving him in quicklime. Which is ridiculous."
"Uh-huh."
"It is. Anyone in my client's line of work knows that quicklime is a very poor solvent. Chemical hydrolysis is the method of choice these days. — Kelley Armstrong

A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look — Patrick O'Brian

Age, with shamefaced relief, has learned the solvent quality of Time. It is this quality which makes possible the contemplation of certain embarrassing heavenly reunions ... — Margaret Deland

We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated. — Norbert Wiener

perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess — Tony Burgess

Pell Grants open a lot of doors, but they rely on a solvent government. — Denny Rehberg

It turned out in the long run that Lincoln's credit and the popular confidence that supported it were as valuable both to his creditors and himself as if the sums which stood over his signature had been gold coin in a solvent bank. — John George Nicolay

Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient
it's not useful
to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it. [p. 69] — Julian Barnes

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest. — Honore De Balzac

I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others' voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. — Nicholson Baker

Communication is the universal solvent. — L. Ron Hubbard

When a man holds his tongue it does not signify much. But when a woman dispenses with the office of the mighty member, when she sheathed her natural weapon at a trying moment, it means that she trusts to still more formidable enginery; to tears it may be, a solvent more powerful than that with which Hannibal softened the alpine rocks ... — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Firewater Sometimes I think how alcohol's a marvelous solvent, can remove red people from a continent, turn bronze to guilt. What was DuPont's old motto - Better things for better living through chemistry? You take potatoes from Peru, barley from Palestine, maize from Mexico, sugar cane from — MariJo Moore

Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth filters itself into our perception through our experiences and is mired by our preconceptions; the true revelation of truth is the elimination of itself in the solvent of experience, its dregs floating to the top, where they can be skimmed out with a ladle and discarded, leaving us only with the marinade, the whole no longer existing, only something of its essence remnant in the taste. — John M. Keller

Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don't have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do. — Nicholson Baker

William Henry Flower the Anglican too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and superstition'. — Adrian Desmond

Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish. — Arne Glimcher

Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Water is commonly regarded as the 'solvent of life,' since our bodies are 70% water. All other vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes, and plants are also primarily water. The organization of water within biological compartments is fundamental to life, and the aquaporins serve as the plumbing systems for cells. — Peter Agre

Credibility is a leader's currency. With it, he or she is solvent; without it, he or she is bankrupt. — John C. Maxwell

Even then, retailers learned early that shoppers prefer their shopping suggestions not be too truthful. One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. — John Scalzi

Ridiculous as our market volatility might seem to an intelligent Martian, it is our reality and everyone loves to trot out the 'quote' attributed to Keynes (but never documented): 'The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent.' For us agents, he might better have said 'The market can stay irrational longer than the client can stay patient.' — Jeremy Grantham

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business. — William Faulkner

Entitlements is not sic the issue. And if so, cool heads can sit down and engage the American people and tell us how many seniors in nursing homes do we want to throw out in the street? ... And then who wants to make a fuss about Medicare when it's solvent until 2024? ... Who wants to make a fuss about Social Security when it's solvent - and it's about, 'You earned it'? — Sheila Jackson Lee

The Republican promise is for policies that create economic growth. Republicans believe lower taxes, less regulation, balanced budgets, a solvent Social Security and Medicare will stimulate economic growth. — Rand Paul

Los Angeles residents are going to vote on a tax on anything sold in a medical marijuana dispensary. If the measure passes the city could be solvent within 45 minutes. — Conan O'Brien

Reality is a powerful solvent. — Tony Judt

Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences. — Honore De Balzac

One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. After history's first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten. — John Scalzi

Astrobiologists now believe that the existence of life throughout the universe requires: 1. a source of energy; 2. a type of atom that allows complex structures to exist; 3. a liquid solvent in which molecules can float and interact; and 4. sufficient time for life to arise and to evolve. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.[ ... ]We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."
Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield. — Kurt Vonnegut

Communication is the solvent of all problems and is the foundation for personal development. — Peter Shepherd

A rare orchid that gives off its scent only at night," Nettle replied. "The petals are pure white, far more delicate even than jasmine. One cannot obtain the essence by heating the blossoms- they are too fragile."
"Cold enfleurage, then?" Lillian murmured, referring to the process of soaking the precious petals in sheets of fat until it was saturated with their fragrance, then using an alcohol-based solvent to draw out the pure essence.
"Yes."
She took another breath of the exquisite essence. "What is the orchid's name?"
"Lady of the Night."
That elicited a delighted chuckle from Daisy. "That sounds like the title of one of the novels my mother has forbidden me to read. — Lisa Kleypas

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren. — Kurt Vonnegut

In light of these facts Republicans have put forth a variety of proposals to make Social Security remain solvent for future generations. But up to this point, Democrats have chosen to oppose our good faith efforts and insist that indeed there is no problem. — John Doolittle

We expect a great deal of each other - that our partner should be sexually appealing as well as a stable companion; an intellectual equal who will also be a good parent; someone with whom we are completely compatible, sharing a similar outlook, attitudes, values and pursuits who will remain solvent and never be boring - the perfect complement to how we imagine ourselves, or, more usually, would like to. — Kate Figes

Oxford, where the real and the unreal jostle in the streets; where North Parade is in the south and South Parade is in the north, where Paradise is lost under a pumping station; where the river mists have a solvent and vivifying effect on the stone of the ancient buildings, so that the gargoyles of Magdalen College climb down at night and fight with those from Wykeham, or fish under the bridges, or simply change their expressions overnight; Oxford, where windows open into other worlds ...
Oscar Baedecker, The Coasts of Bohemia — Philip Pullman

But again I dont know. Maybe it didn't take even three years of freedom, immunity from it to learn that perhaps the entire dilemma of man's condition is because of the ceaseless gabble with which he has surrounded himself, enclosed himself, insulated himself from the penalties of his own folly, which otherwise - the penalties, the simple red ink - might have enabled him by now to have made his condition solvent, workable, successful. — William Faulkner

faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. Such fears as these are a solvent that can eat out the cement that binds the stones together; they may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only in so far as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until we have tangible ground for misgiving. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion. I do not say that — Nelson Algren

Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation. — Paul Hoffman

When I was in the middle of the 'Scott Pilgrim' series, and it was slowly becoming more popular, though still not financially solvent, I had this real bratty instinct to turn around and do something super arty and dark. I felt dismissed by comics culture, stuck in between the artcomix world and the nerdcomix world, and I was cranky about it. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

We think it would be safer if the Bank of England had responsibility for solvency regulation of UK-based banks, as well as having an overall duty to keep the system solvent. Otherwise, there could be dangerous delays if a banking crisis did hit. — John Redwood

It used to be that each time you fell in love, the effort of loving released in you the energy to hold everything together a little longer. Then, after several months or years, when things began to crack apart again, you would fall in love with someone else. New energy would be released, and for a time you and your world would be safe once more.

By now, however, you have exhausted that. There seems to be no energy left - if you had discovered alcohol earlier it might have saved a few broken hearts. For you, alcohol is not the problem - it's the solution: dissolving all the separate parts into one. A universal solvent. An ocean. — Ron Butlin

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. — John Maynard Keynes

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient
it's not useful
to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it. — Julian Barnes

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer. — Max Beerbohm

For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president's in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep. — Malcolm Forbes

Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels. — Aldo Leopold

In the medium and long term. Spain is solvent and able to pay its high debts. In the short-term, we have the capacity to meet our obligations. — Luis De Guindos

Keep your section solvent, keep your job. — Michael Alexander

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism. — George Santayana

Give it time, I thought. I grow on people; I'm like an industrial solvent, I'll wear you down... — Wilton Barnhardt

Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt. — Saul Alinsky

I do not believe in excuses. I believe in hard work as the prime solvent of life's problems. — James Cash Penney

The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek's money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will . . . — William Gibson

We are ... led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by "soft" data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful. — Bertrand Russell

What is the value of the Gnani's [the enlightened one's] feet? It is a value that is immeasurable. The Gnani's feet is one & the only solvent to dissolve egoism. — Dada Bhagwan

My major task was to keep us solvent. — Cheryl Crawford

Liquid water has importance as a solvent, a solute, a reactant and a biomolecule, structuring proteins, nucleic acids, cells and controlling our consciousness. In the meanwhile, water makes up over about half of us and the most abundant solid material and fundamental to start formation. There is a hundred times as many water molecules in our bodies as the sum of all the other molecules. Life cannot evolve or continue, or in other words, everything is nothing without water. Thus, we say that water plays a central role in many of the human activities. However, we nearly always overlook deep researches in the structure and properties of water and the special relationship it has with our lives. — Xiao Feng Pang