Robert Ballard Quotes

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

I used to dig around the sandbox and pull out pieces of coal and show them to my mother, and she used to say that's how I must have known I was going to be a geologist.

In my junior year, I studied geology on Saturday mornings at the Museum of Natural History. Mineralogy has always been a major interest.

As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.

My grandpa was a geologist, and I always had this fascination with not only earth sciences but ancient history.

I would have been a geologist.

I happen to hold a bachelor of science degree in geology... And my greatest contribution to the field of science is that I never entered it.

Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature; and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.

When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.

Geology differs as widely from cosmogony, as speculations concerning the creation of man differ from history.

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?

Unfortunately, we haven't found many very old rocks on Earth because our planet's surface is constantly renewed by plate tectonics, coupled with erosion.

If we strike a line to the N.W. from Sydney to Wellington Valley, we shall find that little change takes place in the geological features of the country.

I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

Geology has shared the fate of other infant sciences, in being for a while considered hostile to revealed religion; so like them, when fully understood, it will be found a potent and consistent auxiliary to it, exalting our conviction of the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator.

I've been collecting rocks since I was 8 and have over 200 different specimens.

Even the continents drift.

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion.

I'm really into rocks. I have a really serious rock collection. Rocks and feathers and shells and strange found things in nature. I have a lot of those kinds of collections.

Pressure, no doubt, has always been a most important factor in the metamorphism of rocks; but there is, I think, at present some danger in over-estimating this, and representing a partial statement of truth as the whole truth. Geology, like many human beings, suffered from convulsions in its infancy; now, in its later years, I apprehend an attack of pressure on the brain.