Geologist Quotes

• Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.

  Neil Armstrong

  Reality, Rocks, Remember

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• Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

  Will Durant

  Change, Civilization, Existence

  "What is Civilization?". Ladies' Home Journal, Volume LXIII, January 1946.

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• I suggest that the best geologist is he who has seen most rocks.

  Herbert Harold Read

  Science, Rocks

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• With their four-dimensional minds, and in their interdisciplinary ultra verbal way, geologists can wiggle out of almost anything.

  John McPhee

  Mind, Four, Way

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• The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.

  Louis Agassiz

  Children, Science, Hands

  Louis Agassiz (1873). “Geological Sketches”, p.11

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• Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

  Bill Bryson

  Loss

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.184, Lulu Press, Inc

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• No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Creativity, Science

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• The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak

  Earth, Geology, Archaeologists

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak (2011). “The Arctic Home in the Vedas”, p.21, Arktos

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• The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

  John Ruskin

  Steps, Chemist, Practicals

  John Ruskin (1873). “Pt. 3, sections 1-2 of the imaginative and theoretic faculties”, p.8

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• We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Morning, Philosophy

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2366, Delphi Classics

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• The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beautiful, Nature, Flower

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU - Ultimate Collection: 6 Books, 26 Essays & 60+ Poems, Including Translations. Biographies & Letters (Illustrated): Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada, Canoeing in the Wilderness, Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, Excursions, Poems of Nature, Familiar Letters…”, p.192, e-artnow

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• Climate has always changed. It always has and always will. Sea level has always changed. Ice sheets come and go. Life always changes. Extinctions of life are normal. Planet Earth is dynamic and evolving. Climate changes are cyclical and random. Through the eyes of a geologist, I would be really concerned if there were no change to Earth over time. In the light of large rapid natural climate changes, just how much do humans really change climate?

  Ian Plimer

  Eye, Light, Ice

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• For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors, but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man.

  George Leigh Mallory

  Adventure, Men, Doctors

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• The field of the Geologist's inquiry is the Globe itself, ... [and] it is his study to decipher the monuments of the mighty revolutions and convulsions it has suffered.

  William Buckland

  Science, Inquiry, Fields

  William Buckland (1820). “Vindiciæ Geologicæ: The Connexion of Geology with Religion, Explained in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of Readership in Geology”, p.5

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• I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

  Charles Darwin

  Book, Writing, Long

  Charles Darwin, Frederick Burkhardt, Sydney Smith (1985). “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin”, p.338, Cambridge University Press

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• As geology is essentially a historical science, the working method of the geologist resembles that of the historian. This makes the personality of the geologist of essential importance in the way he analyzes the past.

  Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

  Science, Past, Personality

  "The Scientific Character of Geology" by Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, The Journal of Geology, Vol. 69, No. 4 (pp. 453-463), July 1961.

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• It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas - whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers, ranchers, and bureaucrats - and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place - there is nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true. That is why we are here. That is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Land, Intellectual, Farmers And Ranchers

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “An Unspoken Hunger”, p.77, Vintage

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• Geologists claim that although the world is running out of oil, there is still a 200-hundred-year supply of brake fluid.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Running, Years

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• The best way to study Mars is with two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars... and then on the surface.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Eye, Science, Moon

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• The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop 'granite.' They say 'granodiorite' when they are in church and 'granite' the rest of the week.

  John McPhee

  Church, Enthusiasm, Affection

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.22, Macmillan

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• Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Travel, Greatness, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Essays (Annotated Edition)”, p.227, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Essentially every scientist, when posed with the question, "If you want to get science knowledge from Mars, do you want to send a geologist or do you want to send a robot?" Well, the real answer is, you can send 100 robots for the price of sending one geologist, so let's send 100 robots to 100 different locations, and then we would all benefit. So that's the answer you would get. And I agree with that answer.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Real, Want, Location

  Source: bookriot.com

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• I've often thought that if planners were botanists, zoologists, geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.

  William O. Douglas

  People, Zoologist, City Planning

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• If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

  John Ruskin

  Cadence, Hammers, Bible Verse

  Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, George Allan Cate (1982). “The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin”, p.14, Stanford University Press

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• The subjective element in geological studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists. One considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science.

  Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

  Art, Science, Two

  "Methods of Prospection for Chromite" by Robert Woodtli, (p. 80), 1964.

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