Quotes About Substance

As Aquinas, the quintessential theologian, says: "The notion of form is most fully realized in existence itself. And in God existence is not acquired by anything, but God is existence itself subsistent. It is clear, then, that God himself is both limitless and perfect."28

In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.

The content has both form and substance: for example, the form is prison and the substance is those that are locked up, the prisoners . . . The expression also has a form and a substance: for example, the form is penal law and the substance is 'delinquency' in so far as it is the object of statements.

Never forget that the universe is a single living organism possessed of one substance and one soul, holding all things suspended in a single consciousness and creating all things with a single purpose that they might work together spinning and weaving and knotting whatever comes to pass.

This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material?

The fraction of infinity, of that vast abyss of time, allotted to each of us. Absorbed in an instant into eternity. The fraction of all substance, and all spirit. The fraction of the whole earth you crawl about on. Keep all that in mind, and don't treat anything as important except doing what your nature demands, and accepting what Nature sends you.

There is but one light of the sun, though it be intercepted by walls and mountains, and other thousand objects. There is but one common substance of the whole world, though it be concluded and restrained into several different bodies, in number infinite. There is but one common soul, though divided into innumerable particular essences and natures. So is there but one common intellectual soul, though it seem to be divided.

I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to. Every portion of me will be reassigned as another portion of the world, and that in turn transformed into another. Ad infinitum. I was produced through one such transformation, and my parents too, and so on back. Ad infinitum. N.B.: Still holds good, even if the world goes through recurrent cycles.

At all times, look at the thing itself—the thing behind the appearance—and unpack it by analysis: cause substance purpose and the length of time it exists.

Everything material soon disappears in the substance of the whole; and everything formal (causal) is very soon taken back into the universal reason; and the memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together

There is one universe out of all things, one god pervading all things, one substance, one law, one common reason in all intelligent beings, and one truth.

Then it became a biological metaphor in the birth stories: Jesus as Son of God was conceived by the Spirit of God, not by a human father. Ultimately, it became a metaphysical or ontological claim: Jesus as the only begotten Son of God is of one substance with God. But initially, to see Jesus as the Son of God points to a relationship of special intimacy and agency.

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.

Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later.

The spiritual substance from which comes all visible wealth is never depleted. It is right with you all the time and responds to your faith in it and your demands on it.

I wonder why people like to believe I'm high all the time. I guess . . . maybe they think someone else can take their trip for them.

Do not waste your time on light, weak, milk­toast ministries and books

How little one guessed of people when one saw them only in the single dimension of a few days or weeks; how they lacked all the substance of the past. They seemed almost flat, like cardboard, with all the depth gone.

What had Jesse said? She is made of alabaster. And alabaster is a stone through which light can pass.

Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.

Reality is the best reassurance of all.

Because if I don't, Fang will die. (Aimee) Are you high? (Dev) No. (Aimee) C'mon, Aim, admit it. Heavy amounts of drugs are involved here. (Dev)

Your mind is your life. It's your essence and your substance. It's the part of you that has always been and will always be. Its formations change constantly, which is what makes you always new.