earth Quotes

“This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”

The earth does not want new continents, but new men.

“This was one of those happy days that God grants us sometimes on earth, to give us an idea of the bliss of heaven.”

The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.

“The crust of the earth is a vast museum.”

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can’t hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then–maybe-the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”

“The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”

“She tried to find the place in her heart where her life was anchored, but she couldn’t, so she closed her eyes and pressed the palms of her hands against the earth, making sure it was there.”

“The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.”

“But Wang Lung thought of his land and pondered this way and that, with the sickened heart of deferred hope, how he could get back to it. He belonged, not to this scum which clung to the walls of a rich man’s house; nor did he belong to the rich man’s house. He belonged to the land and he could not live with any fullness until he felt the land under his feet and followed a plow in the springtime and bore a scythe in his hand at harvest.”

“Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward.”

“The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

“There was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods . . . Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together—together—producing the fruit of this earth.”

“The folly of men has enhanced the value of gold and silver because of their scarcity; whereas, on the contrary, it is their opinion that Nature, as an indulgent parent, has freely given us all the best things in great abundance, such as water and earth, but has laid up and hid from us the things that are vain and useless.”

“When you are next to the earth, you can hear her secrets.”

“Our earth is like a child who has grown up without parents, having no one to guide and direct her...Some have attempted to help her, but most have simply tries to use her.”

“The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.”

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.”

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

“We were wanderers from the beginning.”

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

“Nothing lives long Only the earth and mountains”

“Growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.”

“Our work goes wrong when we lose touch with the God who works “his salvation in the midst of the earth.” It goes wrong both when we work anxiously and when we don’t work at all, when we become frantic and compulsive in our work (Babel) and when we become indolent and lethargic in our work.”

″‘The reason so many people are starving is because we’ve wrecked the planet. The Earth is dying, you know? It’s time to leave.‘”

“Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few.”

“All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.”

“The divine is not something high above us. It is in heaven, it is in earth, it is inside us.”

“Once, he thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it’s only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at least not on Earth.”

″“Maybe this was the last spider. The last living spider on Earth. In that case it’s all over for spiders, too.”

“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”

“In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now, by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached, and then shriveled and brittle. They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.”

“The Martians—dead! ... slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

“The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting and flowing under my eyes.”

“Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

“Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell.”

“There will never be peace on earth until there is peace in us.”

“See the TURTLE of enormous girth ... On his shell he holds the earth.”

“Then it all came crowding back upon him, and he scarcely dared to believe that there was earth, solid earth beneath him; that once more Moana, the Sea God, had been cheated.”

“When Love doth those sweet eyes to earth incline, And weaves those wandering notes into a sigh With his own touch, and leads a minstrelsy Clear-voiced and pure, angelic and divine,— He makes sweet havoc in this heart of mine, And to my thoughts brings transformation high, So that I say, ‘My time has come to die, If fate so blest a death for me design.’ But to my soul, thus steeped in joy, the sound Brings such a wish to keep that present heaven, It holds my spirit back to earth as well. And thus I live: and thus is loosed and wound The thread of life which unto me was given By this sole Siren who with us doth dwell.”

“He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations.”

“In school, we learned about the world before ours, about the angels and gods that lived in the sky, ruling the earth with kind and loving hands. Some say those are just stories, but I don’t believe that. The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.”

″ I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”

“He well knew why He did, and what He meant. For in that fairest chain of love He bound Fire and air and water and the ground Of earth in certain limits they may not flee.”

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. ”

“For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”

“On the scale of worlds--to say nothing of stars or galaxies--humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”

“A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?”

“The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past--some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.”

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

“A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, power lines, and right-angled surfaces.”

“We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it.”

“Do not make the mistake of supposing that the little world you see around you - the Earth, which is a mere grain of dust in the Universe - is the Universe itself. There are millions upon millions of such worlds, and greater. And there are millions of millions of such Universes in existence.”

“But only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all.”

“Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?”

“There’s not some other world out there where everything’s gonna be okay. There’s just this one, just this rock.”

“You are this earth. You are not a fantasy: you are my love. And love is friendship lit by a wooden match with a white tip on its red tip. I am your match, and you are mine.”

“That’s how justice works around here. We don’t have jails or fines. If you commit a serious crime, we exile you to Earth. For everything else, there’s Rudy.”

“It’s only one-sixth Earth’s gravity. Walking doesn’t take much energy.”

″‘I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth,’ she sobbed. ‘Yes, darling. But the earth doesn’t have any ends. Columbus fixed that.‘”

“I have no use for divine patience - My lips are now burning and everywhere. I am running from every corner of this earth and sky Wanting to kiss you.”

“But Odin and his brothers created the earth, it was they who made Midgard. The sun shone from the south upon the stones of their hall, and the land turned green with growing plant-life.”

“Jesus is the Commander of two armies. One is an army of angels in heaven and one is the army of prayer warriors on earth. ”

“There are many things God wants to do on earth and in people’s lives, but if someone doesn’t leap in and answer the call to pray, it won’t happen.”

″ Way back in the days when the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean,”

″ I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. ”

“Man might carve his mark on the earth, but unless he’s vigilant, Nature will take it all back.”

“Beegu told her parents all about life on Earth. How Earth creatures were mostly big and unfriendly, but there were some small ones who seemed hopeful.”

“Beegu was not supposed to be here. She was lost.”

“Although they bounced him and bumped him, and threw him like a feather on the wind...Max did not fly. He just floated gently back to earth.”

“Heaven is eternal, the Earth everlasting.”

“The wind blew across the water, shattering the tips of the waves and shooting ice-sparklets north with the storm. ‘Kapugen!’ she called. No one answered. Kapugen was gone. The earth was empty and bleak.”

“And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.”

“But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.”

“Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”

“Somewhere in the flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries.”

“But he said, in substance, to himself that if the earth and moon were about to clash, many persons would doubtless plan to get upon the roofs to witness the collision.”

“Little Bear’s mother turned around to see what on earth could make a noise like kuplunk! ‘Garumpf!’ she cried, choking on a mouthful of berries, ‘This is not my child! Where is Little Bear?’ She took one good look and backed away. (She was old enough to she shy of people, even a very small person like Little Sal.) Then she turned around and walked off very fast to hunt for Little Bear.”

“The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.”

“Everything seems to have a soul—wood, stones, the wine we drink and the earth we tread on. Everything, boss, absolutely everything!”

“I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”

“Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every living organism is bred to be slaughtered.”

“Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect.”

“This must not be planet earth,” Cone told his partner. “This must be hell.” But it wasn’t. It was just Odessa.”

“The Greeks even had a third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the horizon, and only later see the hull?”

“On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”

“What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?”

“Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?”

“For old Mrs. Earth was fast asleep; and, like many pretty people, she looked still prettier asleep than awake. The great elm trees in their gold-green meadows were fast asleep above, and the cows fast asleep beneath them; nay, the few clouds which were about were fast asleep likewise, and so tired that they had lain down on the earth to rest, in long white flakes and bars, among the stems of the elm trees, and along the tops of the alders by the stream, waiting for the sun to bid them rise and go about their days business in the clear blue overhead.”

“The earth was rushing past like a river or a sea below him. Trees and water and green grass hurried away beneath. Now there was nothing but the roofs of houses sweeping along like a great torrent of stones and rocks. Chimney’s fell and tiles flew from the roofs. There was a great roaring for the wind was dashing against London like a stormy sea. Diamond, of course, at the back of North Wind was in a calm but he could hear it.”

“I can see the first star peeping out of the sky. I don’t see anything more except a few leaves and the big sky over me. It goes swinging about. The earth is all behind my back. There comes another star! The wind with its kisses makes me feel as if I were up in North Wind’s arms.”

“Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death’s house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is.”

“Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth.”

“Every black person in the South knows it’s true. Dead, living, no matter. Both worlds are close. Spirits aren’t gone.”

“If all the oceans on Earth were ink, and all of the trees were pens, they still would not be sufficient to write down the knowledge God has.”

“I tried running- the action of the earth’s surface threw me to the ground. I tried walking- I doddered, staggered, floundered, and tumbled. I tried crawling, but the earth’s rumblings and heavings kept rolling me over on my side. I Iooked up at the mountain ahead and saw at once that it would be impossible to reach in the short time allotted me.”

“Jenny had never been in a forest, but strangely enough she was not frightened. The odd smells oozing from the earth and trees delighted her. The farther she went, the more the forest seemed like something that had happened to her long ago.”

“While visiting Conshelf Ten, an underwater colony on Earth, a young Moon boy becomes involved with dissident Gillmen whose plans threaten the whole world.”

“Earth’s gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second. Period. And I’m experiencing more than that. There’s only one possible explanation. I’m not on Earth.”

“Following the colonization of Mars, a brief but catastrophic Interplanetary War takes place between Mars and Earth. After both planets make peace with each other, a large-scale colonization initiative is carried out by genetically-engineered humans called Star People throughout the galaxy.”

“Wake every person, pig, and pup, till everyone on earth is up!”

‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth!’

I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear the same kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I do not think the same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay for such thinkers as the majority selects.

“Happy, happy earth! Fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome.”