Hugh Miller Quotes

21 quotes in 557 categories

• The development doctrines are doing much harm on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among intelligent mechanics, and a class of young men engaged in…
• Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology…
• The existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print in the sand-to refer to his happy illustration-does now…
• The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into…
• Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like…
• No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;-it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;-and there is but one other alternative. They began to be,…
• That special substance according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is…
• Poets need be in no degree jealous of the geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity charged with…
• Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.
• It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed.
• It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, life fruit…
• The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence…
• But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all…
• Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.
• All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.
• The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no examples of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has no repetition…
• But the advice was not taken - Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear - though I failed to…
• Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields; from time immemorial, far beyond the…
• Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this…
• They were, I doubt not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and had plenty to eat; and I was at times…

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