Quotes about solidity
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Sylvia Day photo
Ron Rash photo
Thomas Wolfe photo
Bruno Latour photo

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”

Bruno Latour (1947) French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist

Source: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

David Levithan photo
Yann Martel photo
Charlotte Brontë photo
Josh Homme photo

“You're solid gold, I'll see you in hell.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

"You Can't Quit Me Baby", Queens of the Stone Age (1998)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Philip K. Dick photo

“For me, I have seen worlds and people begin and end, actually and metaphorically, and it will always be the same. It’s always fire and water.
No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you’re an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. Whatever you know about their true natures is rafted on top of that. So, when it comes to the day-to-day sensations of living, from mixing a cup of coffee to flying a kite, you treat with the four ideal elements of the old philosophers: earth, air, fire, water.
Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored. Earth? The trouble with earth is that it endures. Solid objects tend to persist with a monotonous regularity.
Not so fire and water, however. They’re formless, colorful, and they’re always doing something. While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out. It is coincidence that we’ve filled hells with fires and oceans with monsters? I don’t think so. Both principles are mobile, which is generally a sign of life. Both are mysterious and possess the power to hurt or kill. It is no wonder that intelligent creatures the universe over have reacted to them in a similar fashion. It is the alchemical response.”

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 6 (pp. 137-138)

James Hamilton photo

“The word of God is solid; it will stand a thousand readings; and the man who has gone over it the most frequently and the most carefully is the surest of finding new wonders there.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 36.

Henry Liddon photo

“As all true virtue, wherever found, is a ray of the life of the All-Holy; so all solid knowledge, all really accurate thought, descends from the Eternal Reason, and ought, when we apprehend it, to guide us upwards to Him.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 366.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

C. N. R. Rao photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Starhawk photo
Brigham Young photo
Edmund Burke photo
Edwin Abbott Abbott photo

“Solidity, rigidity, what did not yield to the pressure of the hand attracted me.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 88.

Vitruvius photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Werner Herzog photo
Isa Genzken photo
Howard Zinn photo
Neville Chamberlain photo
John Dalton photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Zend explaining the Spawn of Dagon to Elak
Short fiction, The Spawn Of Dagon (1938)
Context: "They dare'd not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. … This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn't pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room" — Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors — "in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough — more than enough — to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon's breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis."

C. N. R. Rao photo
Vitruvius photo
Han-shan photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo photo

“I have spared no effort to establish upon a solid and enduring basis those sentiments of union and concord which are so indispensible for the progress and advancement of all those who dwell in my native land, and, so long as I live, I propose to use all the means at my command to see to it that both races cast a stigma upon the disagreeable events that took place on the Sonoma frontier in 1846. If before I pass on to render an account of my acts to the Supreme Creator, I succeed in being a witness to a reconciliation between victor and vanquished, conquerors and conquered, I shall die with the conviction of not having striven in vain. In bringing this chapter to a close, I will remark that, if the men who hoisted the “Bear Flag” had raised the flag that Washington sanctified by his abnegation and patriotism, there would have been no war on the Sonoma frontier, for all our minds were prepared to give a brotherly embrace to the sons of the Great Republic, whose enterprising spirit had filled us with admiration. Ill-advisedly, however, as some say, or dominated by a desire to rule without let or hindrance, as others say, they placed themselves under the shelter of a flag that pictured a bear, an animal that we took as the emblem of rapine and force. This mistake was the cause of all the trouble, for when the Californians saw parties of men running over their plains and forests under the “Bear Flag,” they thought that they were dealing with robbers and took the steps they thought most effective for the protection of their lives and property.”

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–1890) Californian military commander, politician, and rancher

As quoted by George Mason University's History Matters: “More Like A Pig Than a Bear”: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo Is Taken Prisoner During the Bear Flag Revolt, 1846
Historical and Personal Memoirs Relating to Alta California (1875)

Jay Leiderman photo

“Investigators like to wave around the word ‘gang.’ They use it to strike fear in the heart of the community. It tends to also involve a lot of puffery and allegations that maybe perhaps aren’t 100 percent solid.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As said in a Ventura County Star article about a Mexican Mafia Case Leiderman was defending. http://www.vcstar.com/news/one-man-led-large-prison-crime-ring-in-ventura
Variant: Investigators like to wave around the word "gang". They use it to strike fear in the heart of the community. It tends to also involve a lot of puffery and allegations that maybe perhaps aren't 100 percent solid.

Wassily Kandinsky photo
Fritjof Capra photo
Jerome David Salinger photo
Arthur James Balfour photo
K. R. Narayanan photo
Herbie Brennan photo
Julien Offray de La Mettrie photo

“Ancient philosophy will always hold its own among those who are worthy to judge it, because it forms… a system that is solid and well articulated like the body, whereas all these scattered members of modern philosophy form no system.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) French physician and philosopher

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

Taylor Caldwell photo
Lal Bahadur Shastri photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Moshe Dayan photo

“A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

Statement made in April 1973 from the peaks of Massada.
The Iron Wall (1999)

Henry David Thoreau photo

“The most solid documentary of the week was White Rhodesia (BBC1), presented by Hugh Burnett. He was on screen only two or three times and even when he was there you would have sworn he wasn't.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'A load of chunk'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Patrick Rothfuss photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“Marriage is the proper Remedy. It is the most natural State of Man and therefore the State in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness… [W]hen Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good… [Y]ou should prefer old Women to young ones.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/51-fra.html (25 June 1745)
Epistles

Sarah McLachlan photo
Francis Bacon photo
William James photo

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Vanna Bonta photo

“What appears to us solid is ultimately both a particle and a wavelength, and on that realm everything behaves as both a particle and a wave.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

Henry Moore photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
C. N. R. Rao photo
James Frazer photo
William Saroyan photo
Mitt Romney photo
John Calvin photo
Marie-Louise von Franz photo

“Since Switzerland has nothing else to identify it…and since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.”

Alan Coren (1938–2007) humorist and writer from the United Kingdom

"And Though They Do Their Best To Bring…".
The Sanity Inspector (1974)

Francis Bacon photo
George Boole photo
Giorgio de Chirico photo

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475
1920s and later

Will Arnett photo

“(On his Emmy nomination) I am humbled by the nomination. I got to work with a cast and writers made up of geniuses. The good news is I can finally realize my life long dream and buy my wife a solid gold speed boat.”

Will Arnett (1970) Canadian actor

"Stars React to Emmy Nominations," Access Hollywood (2006) http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah814.shtml
2006

Winston S. Churchill photo

“The traditional British view is that character is what matters in a general. They like a solid, simple man, with no newfangled nonsense about him. He should be preternaturally silent. If by chance he thinks at all he should not let this leak out, otherwise confidence would be destroyed.”

Today's Battles. Collier's, 7 October 1939.
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 487. ISBN 0903988429
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Thomas Little Heath photo
Michael Chabon photo
Vitruvius photo
James A. Garfield photo

“The return to solid values is always hard… Distress, panic, and hard times have marked our pathway in returning to solid values.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

Speech (22 June 1874) US Congressional Record, 43rd Congress, 2nd session
1870s

Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Joseph Story photo

“If these Commentaries shall but inspire in the rising generation a more ardent love of their country, an unquenchable thirst for liberty, and a profound reverence for the constitution and the union, then they will have accomplished all that their author ought to desire. Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence. The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.”

Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 2d ed. (1851), vol. 2, chapter 45, p. 617. This passage was not in the first edition, but in all later editions.

Tom Robbins photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

Kent Hovind photo
H. G. Wells photo

“"You don't understand," he said, "who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you." Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. "Here," he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible anticipation passed through the bar. "Oh, my Gard!" said some one. Then off they came.It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!”

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 7: The Unveiling of the Stranger

John Howe (illustrator) photo
Jimmy Hoffa photo
Richard Henry Lee photo

“The military forces of a free country may be considered under three general descriptions — 1. The militia. 2. the navy — and 3. the regular troops — and the whole ought ever to be, and understood to be, in strict subordination to the civil authority; and that regular troops, and select corps, ought not to be kept up without evident necessity. Stipulations in the constitution to this effect, are perhaps, too general to be of much service, except merely to impress on the minds of the people and soldiery, that the military ought ever to be subject to the civil authority, &c. But particular attention, and many more definite stipulations, are highly necessary to render the military safe, and yet useful in a free government; and in a federal republic, where the people meet in distinct assemblies, many stipulations are necessary to keep a part from transgressing, which would be unnecessary checks against the whole met in one legislature, in one entire government. — A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. The powers to form and arm the militia, to appoint their officers, and to command their services, are very important; nor ought they in a confederated republic to be lodged, solely, in any one member of the government. First, the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia, by providing that the militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usuage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms; and that all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenceless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments in the community to be avoided. I am persuaded, I need not multiply words to convince you of the value and solidity of this principle, as it respects general liberty, and the duration of a free and mild government: having this principle well fixed by the constitution, then the federal head may prescribe a general uniform plan, on which the respective states shall form and train the militia, appoint their officers and solely manage them, except when called into the service of the union, and when called into that service, they may be commanded and governed by the union. This arrangement combines energy and safety in it; it places the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community, and not in the hands of men destitute of property, of principle, or of attachment to the society and government, who often form the select corps of peace or ordinary establishments: by it, the militia are the people, immediately under the management of the state governments, but on a uniform federal plan, and called into the service, command, and government of the union, when necessary for the common defence and general tranquility. But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia; that is, as I understand it, particular corps or bodies of young men, and of men who have but little to do at home, particularly armed and disciplined in some measure, at the public expence, and always ready to take the field. These corps, not much unlike regular troops, will ever produce an inattention to the general militia; and the consequence has ever been, and always must be, that the substantial men, having families and property, will generally be without arms, without knowing the use of them, and defenceless; whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it. As a farther check, it may be proper to add, that the militia of any state shall not remain in the service of the union, beyond a given period, without the express consent of the state legislature.”

Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) American statesman

Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer, 169 (1788)