The proximity of an army causes prices to go up; and high prices cause people's substance to be drained away. When their substance is drained away, they will be afflicted by heavy exactions. With this loss of substance and exhaustion of strength, the homes of the people will be stripped bare, and their incomes dissipated.
Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.
I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.
When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?
It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance.
No, no, I am but shadow of myself: You are deceived, my substance is not here.
Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it's in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.
