John Wesley Powell Quotes

In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world.

I believe in science and evolution. I've been to the Grand Canyon.

Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.

Quality of life is not only about what you find in the shops; it's about the landscape.

It had rained on some vivid green ferns in Maine and it was quite beautiful. I was moving the camera slightly and studying the ground glass. Looking at those 20 square inches, trying to find out just what were the right elements to include.

For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.

A forest of these trees is a spectacle too much for one man to see.

I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe.

In the spangled sky, the rainbow, the woodland hung with diamonds, the sward sown with pearly dew, the rosy dawn, the golden clouds of even, the purple mountains, the hoary rock, the blue boundless main, Nature's simplest flower, or some fair form of laughing child or lovely maiden, we cannot see the beautiful without admiring it.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

I loved Mississippi and do to this day. The rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon after a summer rain are the most spectacular I have ever seen.

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.

Liesel crossed the bridge over the Amper River. The water was glorious and emerald and rich. She could see the stones at the bottom and hear the familiar song of water. The world did not deserve such a river.

What wonders lie in every mountain day!

Earth has not anything to show more fair.

The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.

The Colorado River did not form the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was formed as the flood went down.

God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.

Well, once you've been in the Canyon and once you've sort of fallen in love with it, it never ends...it's always been a fascinating place to me, in fact I've often said that if I ever had a mistress it would be the Grand Canyon.

Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.

Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.

Way across the country where the hillside mountains glide, the dynamo of your smile caressed the barefoot virgin child.