Louis Agassiz Quotes

The glacier was God's great plough set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth.

How massively the mountains stand, while low to the ground the sand blows. The sand blows on and on. And then there are no mountains, none at all, the sand has kissed and whispered them away. And still, the sand blows on.

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

I'm awful at karaoke, but if I did have to sing, I'd go for my favourite Frank Sinatra song 'I've Got You Under My Skin.' The fact I love Frank is my grandfather's doing: he drummed it into me from a very early age that Frank Sinatra is God.

I happen to be interested in watching a face age. I like faces of women aging so it makes me personally quite sad. That's a beautiful gift from God. If people don't want to see that anymore then I won't be in anymore movies.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Art is transformative. It's not 2+2=4. It works like the sea. It changes geography through its constant and relentless movement, just the way plants and water shape the world.

We live in an age of technology and science that demands proof, and yet we desire mystery. But when God gives us mystery, we seek to destroy it by gross indifference or childish reasoning.

I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them.

If the world was an etch-a-sketch, glaciers are the big shake.

At the end [when I speak about] magma under us everywhere, how it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, recoiled reptiles, and vapid humans alike. You see, you would never hear anything like that in a National Geographic or a PBS movie. This is clearly a transgression when it comes to being politically correct with your commentary.

In the days of my youth I remembered my God! And He hath not forgotten my age.

At age 14, my belief systems began to change about myself, about God, about humans, about values, and about moral standards. I also began to align myself with the principles that are laid down by the Creator in the book called the Bible.

From the age of three on, as far back as I remember, I just knew there was a God behind everything.

The young do not need God, and the old cannot find Him.

Those who have obtained the farthest insight into Nature have been, in all ages, firm believers in God.

But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

The wind is old, but it keeps blowing.

I think an appeal to arms and to brute force is unbecoming the age in which we live. Would to God that the time had come when there should be no war, and that religion and peace should reign throughout the world.

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you aren't old enough. The reason old people believe in God is because they've given up believing in anything else, and one can't exist without faith in something.... God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man, you try to conciliate him because he may knock you down. Moral: don't grow old.