Solidity Quotes - Page 2

• In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenceless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a part.

  Robert Boyle

  Would Be, Fabric, Arches

  Robert Boyle (1772). “The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle: In Six Volumes. To which is Prefixed the Life of the Author ...”, p.469

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• Real power has fullness and variety. It is not narrow like lightning, but broad like light. The man who truly and worthily excels in any one line of endeavor, might also under a change of circumstances, have excelled in some other line. Power is a thing of solidity and wholeness.

  Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

  Real, Power, Men

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• That which we call wit consists much in quickness and tricks, and is so full of lightness that it seldom goes with judgment and solidity; but when they do meet, it is commonly in an honest man.

  King James I

  Men, Honest, Tricks

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• The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.

  James G. Frazer

  Inspire, Cheerful, Splendor

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

  Matthew Arnold

  Thinking, Men, Each Day

  Matthew Arnold (1869). “Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism”, p.9

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Now you know well that the most deadly foes of the Catholic religion have always waged a fierce war, but without success, against this Chair [of St. Peter]; they are by no means ignorant of the fact that religion itself can never totter and fall while this Chair remains intact, the Chair which rests on the rock which the proud gates of hell cannot overthrow and in which there is the whole and perfect solidity of the Christian religion.

  Pope Pius IX

  Christian, Powerful, War

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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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• 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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• 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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