Quotes about solidity
page 4

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Gore Vidal photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Samuel Johnson photo
Robert B. Laughlin photo

“When a thing gets very, very small, you can't tell the difference between a solid and a liquid.”

Robert B. Laughlin (1950) American physicist

16:30 in video
SETI Talk 2013

Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo
Jadunath Sarkar photo
Benjamín Netanyahu photo
Mark Tobey photo
Henry Moore photo
Edward Teller photo

“When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

As quoted in Seven Steps to Starting and Running an Editorial Consulting Business (2002) by Jane M. Frutchey, p. 121

Thomas Little Heath photo
Cees Nooteboom photo
Charles Stuart Calverley photo
Joseph Beuys photo

“I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Joseph Beuys (1982), cited in: Claudia Mesch (2013) Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945. p. 160
1980's

Primo Levi photo
Christopher Walken photo
Vitruvius photo
Magnus Carlsen photo

“He played the Berlin, I played the most solid line, yada yada yada, let's go to the doping control.”

Magnus Carlsen (1990) Norwegian chess player

Magnus Carlsen on the press conference http://www.firstpost.com/sports/anand-admits-he-has-to-liven-things-up-after-another-tame-draw-1239891.html after holding Vishy Anand to a draw in the 8th game of the World championships, using only 15 minutes of his thinking time.

Thomas Carlyle photo

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Bill Gates photo

“The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Source: Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Joan Maragall photo
Dave Barry photo
Maurice de Vlaminck photo
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot photo
Tim Powers photo

“Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.”

Source: Declare (2001), Chapter 12 (p. 345)

Dana Gould photo
Bernard Mandeville photo
Margaret Mead photo

“[A]fter I got evicted from the Republican Party, I began reading considerably more of the works of American anarchists, thanks largely to Murray Rothbard…and I was just amazed.When I read Emma Goldman, it was as though everything I had hoped that the Republican Party would stand for suddenly came out crystallised. It was a magnificently clear statement. And another interesting things about reading Emma Goldman is that you immediately see that, consciously or not, she's the source of the best in Ayn Rand. She has the essential points that the Ayn Rand philosophy thinks, but without any of this sort of crazy solipsism that Rand is so fond of, the notion that people accomplish everything all in isolation. Emma Goldman understands that there’s a social element to even science, but she also writes that all history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions, which of course is what I’d always thought Republicans were saying, and so it goes.In other words, in the Old Right, there were a lot of statements that seemed correct, and they appeal to you emotionally, as well; it was why I was a Republican—isolationist, anti-authoritarian positions, but they’re not illuminated by anything more than statement. They just are good statements. But in the writings of the anarchists the same statements are made, but with this long illumination out of experience, analysis, comparison…it's rock-solid, and so I immediately realised that I'd been stumbling around inventing parts of a tradition that was old and thoughtful and already existed, and that's very nice to discover that—I don't think it's necessary to invent everything.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

William Jones photo

“The fundamental tenet of the Védántí school, to which in a more modern age the incomparable Sancara was a firm and illustrious adherent, consisted, not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but, in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending, that it has no essence independent of mental perception, that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms, that external appearances and sensations are illusory, and would vanish into nothing if the divine energy, which alone sustains them, were suspended but for a moment; an opinion which Epicharmus and Plato seem to have adopted, and which has been maintained in the present century with great elegance, but with little publick applause; partly because it has been misunderstood, and partly because it has been misapplied by the false reasoning of some unpopular writers, who are said to have disbelieved in the moral attributes of God, whose omnipresence, wisdom, and goodness are the basis of the Indian philosophy… [N]othing can be farther removed from impiety than a system wholly built on the purest devotion; and the inexpressible difficulty, which any man, who shall make the attempt, will assuredly find in giving a satisfactory definition of material substance, must induce us to deliberate with coolness, before we censure the learned and pious restorer of the ancient Véda; though we cannot but admit, that, if the common opinions of mankind be the criterion of philosophical truth, we must adhere to the system of Gotama, which the Bráhmens of this province almost universally follow.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

II. pp. 238-239
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Statius photo

“But now the route that used to wear out a solid day barely takes two hours.”
At nunc, quae solidum diem terebat, horarum via facta vix duarum.

iii, line 36
Silvae, Book IV

Honoré de Balzac photo
Auguste Rodin photo

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“Uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

Toby Keith photo
Émile Durkheim photo
David Hume photo
Derren Brown photo
Roberto Clemente photo
John Rogers Searle photo
John Toland photo
Agatha Christie photo

“Proof must be solid break walls of facts.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

(1945)

John Steinbeck photo

“The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business.”

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), but a statement he is first quoted as having made in Newsweek (24 December 1962)

Jane Goodall photo

“This very real difference between GM plants and their conventional counterparts is one of the basic truths that biotech proponents have endeavoured to obscure. As part of the process, they portrayed the various concerns as merely the ignorant opinions of misinformed individuals – and derided them as not only unscientific, but anti-science.
They then set to work to convince the public and government officials, through the dissemination of false information, that there was an overwhelming expert consensus, based on solid evidence, that the new foods were safe. Yet this, as Druker points out, was clearly not true.
Druker describes how amazingly successful the biotech lobby has been – and the extent to which the general public and government decision makers have been hoodwinked by the clever and methodical twisting of the facts and the propagation of many myths. Moreover, it appears that a number of respected scientific institutions, as well as many eminent scientists, were complicit in this relentless spreading of disinformation.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Senior academic condemns ‘deluded’ supporters of GM food as being ‘anti-science’ and ignoring evidence of dangers (4 March 2015) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2979645/Senior-academic-condemns-deluded-supporters-GM-food-anti-science-ignoring-evidence-dangers.html#ixzz4BZ4NnMuY
Foreword to Altered Genes, Twisted Truth (2015)

L. Frank Baum photo
Julius Malema photo

“Malema: So these popcorn and mushrooming political parties in Zimbabwe, they will never find friendship in us. They can insult us here from air-conditioned offices of Sandton, we are unshaken. They must stop shouting at us, they must go and fight with their battle in Zimbabwe and win. Even if they've got ground and they are formed on the basis of solid ground in Zim, why are they speaking in Sandton and not Mashonaland or Matabeleland? … Let them go back and go and fight there. Even when the ANC was underground in exile, we had our internal underground forces fighting for freedom.
Fisher: You live in Sandton.
Malema: And we have never spoken from … exile. Let me tell you before you are tjatjarag [i. e. chatty]. This is a building of a revolutionary party, and you know nothing about the revolution.
Fisher: So, so they are not welcome in Sandton but you are?
Malema: So here you behave or else you jump. [Fisher and others laugh. ] Don't laugh.
Fisher: You're joking.
Malema: Chief, can you get security to remove this thing here. If you are not going to behave … call security to take you out. This is not a news room this. This is a revolutionary house. And you don't come here with that tendency. Don't come here with that white tendency, not here. … If you've got a tendency of undermining blacks even while you work, you are in a wrong place …
Fisher: That's rubbish.
Malema: … and you can go out!
Fisher: Absolutely rubbish.
Malema: Rubbish is what you have covered in that trouser. … You are a small boy, you can't do anything. … Bastard! Go out! You bloody agent! … So we think that we need to ensure that we encourage Zanu PF comrades to engage in peaceful means.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

Outburst against reporter Jonah Fisher at Luthuli House on 8 April 2010, while president of the ANC youth league and after his return from Zimbabwe, ANC's Julius Malema lashes out at 'misbehaving' BBC journalist https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/08/anc-julius-malema-bbc-journalist (8 April 2010)

Alexander Hamilton photo

“We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. Those who mean to form a solid republican government, ought to proceed to the confinges of another government. As long as offices are open to all men, and no constitutional rank is established, it is pure republicanism. But if we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

26 June 1787 per page 105 of "The Debates, Resolutions, and Other Proceedings, in Convention, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution: Supplementary to the state Conventions" by Johnathan Elliot, published 1830 https://books.google.ca/books?id=-gtAAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA105
Debates of the Federal Convention (1787)

Max Beerbohm photo

“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Note to the 1946 edition
Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911)

Frederick Douglass photo

“A man's right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right - and there let it rest forever.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1880)

Daniel Goleman photo
Peter Gabriel photo

“Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Mercy Street
Song lyrics, So (1986)

Sri Aurobindo photo
François Mitterrand photo
Gautama Buddha photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“If our opinions rest upon solid ground, those who attack them do not make us angry, but themselves ridiculous.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 215

Charles Stross photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert photo

“We spoil the dispositions nature has given to women; we neglect their education, fill their minds with nothing solid, and destine them solely to please, and to please only by their graces or their vices.”

Wiki translation based on that of Amelia Gere Mason, The Women of the French Salons; New York: The Century Co., 1891. p. 142.
New Reflections on Women, 1727

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo
Nycole Turmel photo
Sarah Vowell photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Paul Newman photo
Robert Lanza photo
Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
Robert Henryson photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Ambrose Philips photo

“There solid billows of enormous size,
Alps of green ice, in wild disorder rise.”

Ambrose Philips (1674–1749) Anglo-Irish poet and politician

Epistle: "To the Earl of Dorset" (1709), line 21.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Elton John photo

“We'll kill the fatted calf tonight, so stick around,
You're gonna hear electric music, solid walls of sound.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Bennie and the Jets
Song lyrics, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

Matt Mullenweg photo

“The first 3 years the focus would be entirely on […] building a rock solid infrastructure.”

Matt Mullenweg (1984) American entrepreneur

Ma.tt http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/, Starting a Bank, August 2009

George Hendrik Breitner photo

“.. but also for the person who is visiting Paris later in his life for the very first time, something unusual will happen.... then there appears for the man of age a light - a light in which he sees the dreamy images of his life transforming into more tangible and more solid forms. Because that city has created our modern culture, and the movements of life in most countries are just a reflex of those which are starting in France's capital.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Maar ook voor hem die Parijs op latere leeftijd voor het eerst betreedt, gebeurt er iets ongewoons in zijn leven.. ..er gaat voor de mensch van leeftijd een licht op, een licht waarin hij de droomgestalten van zijn leven tot meer tastbare vastere vormen ziet verwezenlijkt. Want die stad heeft onze moderne cultuur geschapen en de bewegingen van het leven in de meeste landen een reflex van die, welke in Frankrijks hoofdstad een aanvang nemen.
Quote of Breitner, after 1884 (when he visited Paris); as cited by Frans Erens, in Vervlogen jaren; De Arbeiderspers, Zwolle 1958, p. 98
undated quotes

Berenice Abbott photo
Gustave de Molinari photo

“The moral foundation of authority is neither as solid nor as wide, under a regime of monopoly or of communism, as it could be under a regime of liberty.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 50

Augustus De Morgan photo
William Wordsworth photo

“To the solid ground
Of Nature trusts the mind that builds for aye.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

A Volant Tribe of Bards on Earth.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Paul Otellini photo

“The best of Intel computing is coming to smartphones. Our efforts with Lenovo and Motorola Mobility will help to establish Intel processors in smartphones and provide a solid foundation from which to build in 2012 and into the future.”

Paul Otellini (1950–2017) former president & CEO of Intel

Solution Providers: Intel Smartphones, 'Wintel' Here To Stay http://crn.com/news/components-peripherals/232400295/solution-providers-intel-smartphones-wintel-here-to-stay.htm in CRN (12 January 2012)

Mickey Spillane photo
Edward O. Wilson photo

“Solid, lasting missionary work is done on our knees.”

James O. Fraser (1886–1938) missionary to China, inventor of Tibeto-Burman Nosu alphabet

Source: Geraldine Taylor. Behind the Ranges: The Life-changing Story of J.O. Fraser. Singapore: OMF International (IHQ) Ltd., 1998, 52.

John J. Pershing photo
Richard Blackmore photo

“The Inclinations of Men, in this their degenerate State, carry them with great Force to those voluptuous Objects, that please their Appetites and gratify their Senses; and which not only by their early Acquaintance and Familiarity, but as they are adapted to the prevailing Instincts of Nature, are more esteem'd and pursu'd than all other Satisfactions. As those inferior Enjoyments, that only affect the Organs of the Body are chiefly coveted, so next to these, that light and facetious Qualification of the Mind, that diverts the Hearers and is proper to produce Mirth and Alacrity, has, in all Ages, by the greatest Part of Mankind, been admir'd and applauded. No Productions of Human Understanding are receiv'd with such a general Pleasure and Approbation, as those that abound with Wit and Humour, on which the People set a greater Value, than on the wisest and most instructive Discourses. Hence a pleasant Man is always caress'd above a wise one, and Ridicule and Satyr, that entertain the Laughers, often put solid Reason and useful Science out of Countenance. The wanton Temper of the Nation has been gratify'd so long with the high Seasonings of Wit and Raillery in Writing and Conversation, that now almost all Things that are not accommodated to their Relish by a strong Infusion of those Ingredients, are rejected as the heavy and insipid Performances of Men of a plain Understanding and meer Masters of Sense.”

Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) English poet and physician

Essay upon Wit http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13484/13484-8.txt (1711)

Jean-Baptiste Say photo

“The luxury of ostentation affords a much less substantial and solid gratification, than the luxury of comfort, if I may be allowed the expression.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book III, On Consumption, Chapter IV, p. 397

Jack McDevitt photo
Chris Jericho photo