Solidity Quotes - Page 2

• It is because gold is rare that gilding has been invented, which, without having its solidity, has all its brilliancy. Thus, to replace the kindness we lack, we have devised politeness which has all its appearance.

  Francis de Gaston, Chevalier de Levis

  Kindness, Gold, Appearance

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• Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.

  E. M. Forster

  Integrity, Character, Class

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• The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Money, Believe, Gold

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• I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we donot teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual; however, for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Honesty, Character

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• Hearing is the motion of molecules; sound is a wave in the atmosphere; solidity is the characteristic of spatial juxtaposition of atoms; smell is something given off by a body, rather than something belonging to a body.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Smell, Atmosphere, Sound

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• Nothing but Christian faith gives to the furthest future the solidity and definiteness which it must have if it is to be a breakwater for us against the fluctuating sea of present cares and thoughts.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Christian, Sea, Giving

  Alexander Maclaren (1873). “Sermons preached in Manchester”, p.140

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• The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candor of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds.

  Edmund Burke

  Money, Foundation, Use

  Edmund Burke (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Edmund Burke (Illustrated)”, p.1560, Delphi Classics

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• The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

  Thomas Huxley

  Ocean, Land, Generations

  Thomas Henry Huxley “Selected Works of Thomas Henry Huxley”, Library of Alexandria

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• All spiritual experiences are sensations in the body. They are simply a graded series of sensations, beginning with the solidity of earth and passing gradually, in full consciousness, through liquidness and the emanation of heat to that of a total vibration before reaching the Void.

  Sri Anirvan

  Spiritual, Soul, Religion

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• Metaphysical ghosts cannot be killed, because they cannot be touched; but they may be dispelled by dispelling the twilight in which shadows and solidities are easily confounded. The Vital Principle is an entity of this ghostly kind; and although the daylight has dissipated it, and positive Biology is no longer vexed with its visitations, it nevertheless reappears in another shape in the shadowy region of mystery which surrounds biological and all other questions.

  George Henry Lewes

  Twilight, Science, Shadow

  George Henry Lewes (1867). “The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte by George Henry Lewes: Ancient philosophy”, p.84

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• I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Believe, Ideas, Two

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.153

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• Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

  J. K. Rowling

  Children, Wall, Atoms

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• And then he was kissing her, and she was struck by his nearness, his solidity, his smell. It was of the garden and the earth and the sun. When Cassandra opened her eyes, she realized she was crying. She wasn't sad, though, these were the tears of being found, of having come home after a long time away.

  Kate Morton

  Eye, Home, Kissing

  Kate Morton (2009). “The Forgotten Garden: A Novel”, p.545, Simon and Schuster

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• Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Mean, Cutting, Space

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.135, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.

  Gary Snyder

  Wall, Fire, Space

  Gary Snyder (1992). “No nature: new and selected poems”, Pantheon

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• The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

  Ezra Pound

  Thinking, Order, Law

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• There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

  E. B. White

  New York, Passion, Night

  "In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers".

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• I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

  Marilynne Robinson

  School, Degrees, Fiction

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• Ordinary people do not question the commonly accepted version of reality. They conform to the standard values of subduing enemies and cherishing friends and family. Materialism, ambition and mundane achievements are the worldly hallmarks of success. We experience the phenomenal world and our minds as solid and truly existent. Very few people doubt these assertions and question their solidity. Yet, the process of disbelief is the first step on the spiritual path.

  Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

  Spiritual, Ambition, Reality

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• Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

  John Derbyshire

  Book, Space, Substance

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• The Universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity - those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity - those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes.

  Hakim Bey

  Spiritual, Eye, Men

  Hakim Bey (2003). “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, p.22, Autonomedia

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• To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Land, Goodness, American History

  William Least Heat Moon (1991). “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America”, Mariner Books

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• Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

  E. B. White

  Passion, Cities, Giving

  E.B. White (2011). “Here is New York”, p.26, New York Review of Books

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• Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy at sea, cut loose from sensory solidity, separated from and witnessing the body from a vast distance.

  Suzanne Segal

  Distance, Cutting, Sea

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• THE BODY SHOULD be triangular, the mind circular. The triangle represents the generation of energy and is the most stable physical posture. The circle symbolizes serenity and perfection, the source of unlimited techniques. The square stands for solidity, the basis of applied control.

  Morihei Ueshiba

  Circles, Squares, Perfection

  Morihei Ueshiba, John Stevens (2010). “The Art of Peace”, p.115, Shambhala Publications

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