Geologist Quotes

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

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

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

If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being, an interesting one if at all possible; second, you must be accurate in what you say, that is, tell the truth (about what is known and what isn't; about issues, debates, controversies); and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist.

Scott L. Montgomery

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.

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.

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

Science is not sacrificing any of its strength nor compromising its ideals. It is technology that is changing - that is becoming less empirical, more systematic, more quantitative, more scientific.

Charles S. Slichter

Experience has shown that whenever a new and more advanced viewpoint has been gained to take the place of an earlier one, and its superiority has come to be acknowledged, the tendency has always been to sketch in from that one standpoint even the more distant objects, rather than to move forward to new and independent positions.

William Herbert Hobbs

The difference between bad observation and good observation is that the former is erroneous; the latter is incomplete.

Charles R. Van Hise

There is ample evidence of suspicion, due to ignorance, directing the thoughts of American people when they consider the actions of peoples in other lands.

Wallace Walter Atwood

We should greatly err, if we endeavoured to force all ancient nature into a close comparison with existing operations.

Roderick Murchison

Rocks are like human beings; they will bend before force, if you give them time enough and are not too rough with them.

Reginald Aldworth Daly

Experimental geology has this in common with all other branches of our science, petrology and palaeontology included, that in the long run it withers indoors.

The geologist, ascending from the oldest and lowest portions of the earth's crust, and dealing for millions of years with physical forces and the instinctive powers of animals alone, at length as he approaches the surface finds himself in contact with an entirely new agency, the free-will and conscious action of man.

John William Dawson

If the continents have moved, then they have drifted like rafts and formed the ocean floors in their wake. It is to this wake that we should look first.

John Tuzo Wilson

Crystallographic science does not consist in the scrupulous description of all the accidents of crystalline form, but in specifying, by the description of these forms, the more or less close relationship they have with each other.

Jean-Baptiste L. Romé de l'Isle

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

William Buckland

In these hurried days, geologists will take no harm from a quiet contemplation of the history of even this small part of their science.

Herbert Harold Read

I shall consider this paper an essay in geopoetry. In order not to travel any further into the realm of fantasy than is absolutely necessary I shall hold as closely as possibly to a uniformitarian approach; even so, at least one great catastrophe will be required early in the Earth's history.

Harry Hammond Hess

I became a geologist forever by seeing with my own eyes: THE EARTH IS ALIVE.

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

Grove Karl Gilbert

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

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.

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