| Aristophanes | The Frogs | Really and truly though 'tis paltry stuff |
| The Thesmophoriazusae | What is this wiseacre stuff you are telling me? | |
| Aristotle | On the Heavens: Book II | ...is composed of the same stuff as that in which it is situated. |
| Euripedes | The Suppliants | ..love, our sons are made of sterner stuff, but less winning are their caresses... |
| Homer | The Odyssey: Book II | ...of the same stuff as your father you will be neither fool nor coward... |
| And in his shrewd mind deep stuff did invent. | ||
| From their fine stuff woven; yet when once the breath | ||
| Lucretius | On the Nature of Things:Book I | From its own stuff, from its own primal bodies. |
| The changeless stuff, and what from that may spring .. | ||
| ...their collapse to primal forms of stuff. | ||
| Plutarch | Agis | ...stuff from Agesistrata, and hoped if he could destroy her and the... |
| Eumenes | ...to redeem your stuff. | |
| Solon | ...little inconsiderable household stuff,... | |
| Thucydides | The History of the Peloponnesian War: The First Book | ...found empty, and plundered the stuff... |
| Plotinus | The Enneads | What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, continuous and without quality? |
| Quran | The Bee 16.80 | (He has given you) household stuff and a provision for a time |
| Giovanni Boccaccio | The Decameron Day 5 | ...as also divers sorts of banquetting stuffe. |
| Dante Alighieri | Paradiso Canto 16 | ...nor covered them with such rough-textured stuff |
| Omar Khayyam | The Rubaiyat | One half so precious as the stuff they sell. |
| St Augustine | Confessions | ... and with one touch remove all that foul stuff? |
| Benjamin Franklin |  | Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. |
| Frost, Robert | Out,Out-- | Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. |
| The Black Cottage | By the same hand working in the same stuff? | |
| The Gum Gatherer | He showed me lumps of the scented stuff | |
| Snow | Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff | |
| Robert Browning | | ... I count life just a stuff |
| Wollstonecraft, Mary | The Rights of Women | —but of such stuff is human rapture made up!— |
| Keats, John | Endymion Book III | One's senses with so dense a breathing stuff |
| Wordsworth, William | Rob Roy's Grave | A world of other stuff. |
| The Prelude: Book Eleventh | And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish,-- | |
| The Excursion: Book Second | What stuff the Dwellers in a solitude | |
| The Excursion: Book Third | Turned inward,--to examine of what stuff | |
| Ecclesiastical Sonnets | The ancient thrones of Christendom are stuff For occupation of a magic wand | |
| Housman, A. E. | Terence, this is stupid stuff | Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink |
| 'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale | ||
| From far, from eve and morning | The stuff of life to knit me | |
| Walt Whitman | As I sat alone by blue Ontario's shores | ...with veins full of poetical stuff... |
| A Woman Waits for Me | I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for These States- | |
| Who is now Reading This | Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in myself, the stuff of wrong-doing, | |
| Leaves of Grass | ...out of hopeful green stuff woven. | |
| Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff'd with the stuff | ||
| ...and of the father-stuff | ||
| This day I am jetting the stuff | ||
| Lawrence, D. H. | Amores: Dreams Nascent | But the dream-stuff is molten and moving mysteriously |
| Alluring my eyes; for I, am I not also dream-stuff | ||
| Amores: Dissolute | What matter the stuff I lick up in my living flame | |
| Amores: Blue | Of the stuff of the night, finding myself all wrongly | |
| Two Wives | To defeat your baser stuff | |
| Graves, Robert | Two Fusiliers | To bind our lovely friendship fast, By firmer stuff |
| Yeats, William Butler | The Wild Swans at Coole: Presences | In rustle of lace or silken stuff, |
| Eliot, T. S. | The Sacred Wood: Hamlet and His Problems. | ...lf-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate... |
| James Joyce | Ulysses, Scylla and Charybdis | ...woven of new stuff time after time |
| Stevenson | Treasure Island | Well, then, I mean this squire and doctor shall find the stuff |
| Tolstoy | Anna Karenina | But why have they all agreed to speak, just in the same manner, always the dreariest and most useless stuff? |
| Karl Marx | Interview in New York World, July 18, 1871 | ...and I can believe that they are not of the stuff of which conspirators are made. |
| Albert Einstein | | One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. |
| Shakespeare | Twelfth Night | "Youth's a stuff will not endure" |
| The Taming of the Shrew | "Thy gown? Why, ay; come, tailor, let us see't. O mercy, God! What masquing stuff is here?" | |
| Hamlet | "And let me wring your heart; for so I shall If it be made of penetrable stuff" | |
| The Tempest | "We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." | |
| King Henry IV Part I | ... A deal of skimble-skamble stuff. | |
| Julius Cesear | Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. | |
| Macbeth | Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff | |
I think though, that Ralph Waldo Emerson sums it up in his essay Compensation: "Everything in nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff."