Geologist Quotes

Charles Lyell

Eduard Suess

James Dwight Dana

William Buckland

Roderick Murchison

Adam Sedgwick

John Wesley Powell

The earth, from her deep foundations, unites with the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space.

William Buckland

The scrutinizing eye of science penetrates with far-reaching sight the system of things about us, and in the dim limits of vision reads everywhere the word mystery.

James Dwight Dana

I can still feel within me the strength and readiness for hardship and suffering, yet I would like to live long enough to see the day when I might freely work for Poland, and not wander aimlessly through God knows what land.[...] And if death finds me working on alien soil, this too will not be without profit for Poland, particularly if among some distant tribe, the farthest possible from our country, they will remember a Pole, will wish Poland well, and will be supportive toward her.

We had found an accursed country. On the fringe of an unspanned continent along whose gelid coast our comrades had made their home—we knew not where—we dwelt where the chill breath of a vast, Polar wilderness, quickening to the rushing might of eternal blizzards, surged to the northern seas.

Roses bloom, and then they wither;
Cheeks are bright, then fade and die;
Shapes of light are wafted hither,
Then, like visions, hurry by.

James Gates Percival

The objectivity of the IPCC documents is laudable. But the fact that the group recognizes its model weaknesses and is trying to improve them doesn't make its conclusions stronger or more believable. (page 83).

Orrin H. Pilkey

The climate stubbornly refuses to co-operate with computer models and the writers of alarmist popular articles and books.

We will be able to depart this life with the quiet peace-giving notion, that we were permitted to contribute to the happiness of many who will live after us. In our long lives we endeavored to unfold the collective consciousness. In our lives we have known hell and heaven; the final balance, however, is that we helped pave the way to dynamic harmony in this earthly house. That, I believe, is the meaning of this live.

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

In vein do we aspire to assign limits to the works of creation in space, whether we examine the starry heavens, or that world of minute animalcules which is revealed to us by the microscope. We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the universe lie beyond the reach of mortal ken.

Dinosaurs are a touchstone that separates the mentality of children from that of adults.

The straightness, symmetry, extent and ubiquity of these patterns is without parallel in geology and their discovery was completely unexpected.

The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse.

John Wesley Powell

The western margin of this continent [North America] is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon whose seaward base beat the mild, small breakers of the Pacific.

It was mistakenly reported that the Times correspondent Morrison had been killed during the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing, to which Morrison responded:

Have just read obituary in the Times. Kindly adjust pay to suit.

George Ernest Morrison

I would rather have a mineral ill-classified and well-described, than well-classified and ill-described.

Abraham Gottlob Werner

I cannot promise to teach you all geology, I can only fire your imaginations.

The laws of physics and chemistry must be the same in a crucible as in the larger laboratory of Nature.

I cannot see of what use these slides can be to a field man. I don't believe in looking at a mountain through a microscope.

Andrew Ramsay (geologist)

With a certain class of minds, fancy comes in to supply the place of facts that fail.

Archibald Geikie

The world over which early man wandered was to him the theatre of a never-ending conflict, in which were arrayed against him impassable seas, unscalable mountains, gloomy forests peopled by deadly beasts of prey, raging streams and foaming torrents, each and all the haunts of spirits luring him to doom.

Charles Lapworth

Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them...

For geologists...the word 'plate' is in somewhat the same position as 'skyscraper' It is a dead (or almost dead) metaphor. Geologists know (or they think they know) what plates are, almost as well as the commuter knows what a skyscraper is.

David Roger Oldroyd

If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on the surface of the earth as it rotates beneath him, the feature, beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be the wedge-like outlines of the continents as they narrow away to the South.

With the sole guidance of our practical knowledge of those physical agents which we see actually used in the continuous workings of nature, and of our knowledge of the respective effects induced by the same workings, we can with reasonable basis surmise what the forces were which acted even in the remotest times.

Giovanni Arduino

In the domain of the world's knowledge there is no infallibility.

Grove Karl Gilbert