William Henry Ashley Quotes

There are two kinds of stones, as everyone knows, one of which rolls.

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.

The traces of upheavals become more impressive when one moves a little higher, when one gets even closer to the foot of the great mountain ranges. There are still plenty of shell layers. We notice them, even thicker and more solid ones.

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

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

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

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.

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 of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life.

When we opened our eyes, we saw bedrock exposed in the walls of the crater.

We're stunned by the diversity of rocks. This stuff looks like it was put into a blender.

The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit.

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

I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.

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.

We choose to believe that the granite is alive. If life is movement, then rock - with its atoms flying around like stars in cosmos - is alive.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had shifted to rocks.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.

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.

The lowest and most level land areas show us, especially when we dig there to very great depths, nothing but horizontal layers of material more or less varied, which almost all contain innumerable products of the sea.