More definitions of "substance":
- (noun): The choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience.
Synonyms: kernel, core, center, essence, gist, heart, heart and soul, inwardness, marrow, meat, nub, pith, sum, nitty-gritty
- (noun): What a communication that is about something is about.
Synonyms: message, content, subject matter
- (noun): The stuff of which an object consists.
- (noun): The idea that is intended.
Synonyms: meaning
- (noun): That which has mass and occupies space.
Synonyms: matter
Famous quotes containing the word substance:
“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)