Rock Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sensei Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Henry David Thoreau

The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.

Simone de Beauvoir

Scarce can I speak, my choler is so great. Oh! I could hew up rocks, and fight with flint.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony.

Thomas Jefferson

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.

Our party remains as firm as this rock and will not be divided by any force in Germany.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.

Now all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky
was my big empty factory...
the Lorax...
and I.
The Lorax said nothing.
Just gave me a glance,
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks with the one word:
UNLESS.
Whatever that meant... well, I just couldn't guess.

I was not long since in a company where I was not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?

Michel de Montaigne

I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.

The person who seeks knowledge while in his youth is similar to the act of inscribing something upon a rock; while the person who seeks knowledge while he is old is similar to the act of writing something upon the water.

Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern... Two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it.

Leonardo da Vinci

Break your pitcher against a rock. We don't need any longer to haul pieces of the ocean around.

I work to loud music - hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns 'n Roses, and Metallica have always been particular favorites - but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door.

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.

Henry David Thoreau

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Rudyard Kipling

O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

William Shakespeare

For now I stand as one upon a rock environed with a wilderness of sea, who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, expecting ever when some envious surge will in his brinish bowels swallow him.

William Shakespeare

Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon 't.

William Shakespeare

Our autopilot was taking us into a verge large crater, about the size of a big football stadium with steep slopes on the crater covered with very large rocks about the size of automobiles that was not the kind of place that I wanted to try to make the first landing.

The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.

Ralph Waldo Emerson