Quotes by Geologists

Don't talk about the problem. Be a part of the solution.
Chris Vonada
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin
As for a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague possibilities.
Charles Darwin
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.
Charles Darwin
As for future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Charles Darwin
A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.
Charles Darwin
I have called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term natural selection.
Charles Darwin
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the "Survival of the fittest" is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
Light may be shed on man and his origins.
Charles Darwin
As for a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague possibilities.
Charles Darwin
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.
Charles Darwin
As for future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Charles Darwin
A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.
Charles Darwin
I have called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term natural selection.
Charles Darwin
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the "Survival of the fittest" is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
Light may be shed on man and his origins.
Charles Darwin
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
I have called the principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin
I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.
Charles Darwin
I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.
Giovanni Arduino
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
Charles Darwin
Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,Classes, by the manner in which that plan is executed, as far as ways and means are concerned, Orders, by the degrees of complication of that structure, Families, by their form, as far as determined by structure, Genera, by the details of the execution in special parts, andSpecies, by the relations of individuals to one another and to the world in which they live, as well as by the proportions of their parts, their ornamentation, etc.
Louis Agassiz
It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.
Charles Lyell
Is the music broke, Mommy?
Edward M. Wolfe
Love is the action verb of life, and of the heart.
Chris Vonada
We talk of independence. No man is independent. We are all interdependent; and we shall only rise as we carry others with us, and as we are assisted by others.
James E. Talmage
Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
Charles Darwin
The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.
Grove Karl Gilbert
For poets the wages of sin are poverty.
William Logan
We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.
Jean-André de Luc
Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.
Joseph LaConte
Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.
Charles Darwin
Here they [the Jaredites] became a flourishing nation; but, giving way in time to internal dissensions, they divided into factions, which warred with one another until the people were totally destroyed (p. 15).
James E. Talmage
The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it. No opinion that cannot stand discussion or criticism is worth holding. And it has been wisely said that the man who knows only half of any question is worse off than the man who knows nothing of it. He is not only one sided, but his partisanship soon turns him into an intolerant and a fanatic. In general it is true that nothing which cannot stand up under discussion and criticism is worth defending.
James E. Talmage
[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
Charles Darwin
Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
Chris Vonada
In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.
Charles Darwin
Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.
J. Tuzo Wilson
probation. Jesus Christ was and is Jehovah, the God of Adam and of Noah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God at whose instance the prophets of the ages have spoken, the God of all nations, and He who shall yet reign on earth as King of kings and Lord of lords.
James E. Talmage
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms her possession of divine authority for the use of the sacred name, Jesus Christ, as the essential part of her distinctive designation. In view of this exalted claim, it is pertinent to inquire as to what special or particular message the Church has to give to the world concerning the Redeemer and Savior of the race, and as to what she has to say in justification of her solemn affirmation, or in vindication of her exclusive name and title. As we proceed with our study, we shall find that among the specific teachings of the Church respecting...
James E. Talmage
It's called the Infinity Effect.
Edward M. Wolfe
The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.
Charles Darwin
Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.
Hugh Miller
Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.
Grove Karl Gilbert
It surely can be no offence to state, that the progress of science has led to new views, and that the consequences that can be deduced from the knowledge of a hundred facts may be very different from those deducible from five. It is also possible that the facts first known may be the exceptions to a rule and not the rule itself, and generalisations from these first-known facts, though useful at the time, may be highly mischievous, and impede the progress of the science if retained when it has made some advance.
Henry Thomas De la Beche
It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children — those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own — being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty...
Charles Darwin
In truth, ideas and principles are independent of men; the application of them and their illustration is man's duty and merit. The time will come when the author of a view shall be set aside, and the view only taken cognizance of. This will be the millennium of Science.
Edward Forbes
We can't always take the higher road when faced with adversity. Sometimes for the sake of restoration, peace and sharing the love of Jesus, we have to walk through the tribulation.
Chris Vonada
In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.
Thomas Gold
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Charles Darwin
I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.
Charles Darwin
Clearly there are common sense things we can do to help children to have better lives and keep them from becoming so despondent that their only perceived solution is to kill themselves or others. How oblivious do we have to be to the inner turmoil of our own children to not see what they're going through, and then suggest when they completely snap with homicidal violence, it must've been the video games?
Edward M. Wolfe
If a deadly snake slithering around in a pre-school bit a child, would you box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the children once again?
Edward M. Wolfe
The earth is large and old enough to teach us modesty.
Hans Cloos
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
Charles Lyell
[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the 'school' to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of his investigations. Hans Cloos called this way of interrogation 'the dialogue with the earth,' 'das Gesprach mit der Erde.
R.W. van Bemmelen
I am here tracing the History of the Earth itself, from its own Monuments.
Jean-André de Luc
Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million years, and you’ve carved the Grand Canyon. Take the creeping pace of which the continents move (about two inches per year on average, or roughly as fast as your fingernails grow). Stretch that over thirty million years, and a continent will travel nearly 1,000 miles. Stretch that over a few billions years, and continents will have time to wander from the tropics to the poles and back, crunching together to assemble super-continents, break apart into new configurations- and do all of that again several times over. Deep time, it could be said, is Nature’s way of giving the Earth room for its history. The recognition of deep time might be geology’s paramount contribution to human knowledge.
Keith Meldahl
Each scenario is about fifteen million years into the future, and each assumes that the Pacific Plate will continue to move northwest at about 2.0 inches per year relative to the interior of North America.In scenario 1, the San Andreas fault is the sole locus of motion. Baja California and coastal California shear away from the rest of the continent to form a long, skinny island. A short ferry ride across the San Andreas Strait connects LA to San Francisco.In scenario 2, all of California west of the Sierra Nevada, together with Baja California, shears away to the northwest. The Gulf of California becomes the Reno Sea, which divides California from Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of how the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa to open the Red Sea some 5 million years ago.In scenario 3, central Nevada splits open through the middle of the Basin and Range province. The widening Gulf of Nevada divides the continent form a large island composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Baja California, and western Nevada. The scene is akin to Madagascar’s origin when it split form eastern Africa to open the Mozambique Channel.
Keith Meldahl