“[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them.”

Ideas
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them." by Samuel Butler?

Samuel Butler232

novelist 1835–1902

Related quotes

“The art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Burke's description of poetry, quoted from his conversation in Prior's Life of Burke
Undated

“We hold that a good book which gives people food for thought, which strengthens and clears their minds, and enables them to grasp truths which they have dimly felt but could not formulate—we hold that such a book does a real, substantial good.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book The Key to Theosophy

Source: The Key to Theosophy (1889)

“Eventually, we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows and search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.”

Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) American astronomer

The Realm of the Nebulae (1936)

“Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.”

Aesop (-620–-564 BC) ancient Greek storyteller

The Dog and the Shadow.

“Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.
Literary Essays, vol. I (1864-1890)

“Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Lew Fields (1941).
Context: Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.

“The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory.”

Michael Frayn book The Tin Men

The Tin Men (London: Collins, 1965) p. 59.