Volcano Quotes - page 3
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!
George Carlin
It is impossible for the mind which is not totally destitute of piety, to behold the sublime, the awful, the amazing works of creation and providence - the heavens with their luminaries, the mountains, the ocean, the storm, the earthquake, the volcano, the circuit of the seasons, and the revolutions of empires - without marking in them all the mighty hand of God, and feeling strong emotions of reverence toward the Author of these stupendous works.
Timothy Dwight IV
We may compare this sum of the life forces, which we call heredity, to the character of a sensitive plate in the camera. Outside pictures impress themselves more or less distinctly on the sensitive plate... Stored within heredity are all joys, sorrows, loves, hates, music, art, temples, palaces, pyramids, hovels, kings, queens, paupers, bards, prophets and philosophers, oceans, caves, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes, wars, triumphs, defeats, reverence, courage, wisdom, virtue, love and beauty, time, space, and all the mysteries of the universe. The appropriate environments will bring out and intensify all these general human hereditary experiences and quicken them again into life and action, thus modifying for good or evil, character-heredity-destiny.
Luther Burbank
We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.
Carl Sagan
The seen and seeing softly mutually strike
Their glass barrier that arrests the sight.
But the world's being hides in the volcanoes
And the foul history pressed into its core;
And to myself my being is my childhood
And passion and entrails and the roots of senses;
I'm pressed into the inside of a mask
At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.
Stephen Spender
Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.
Tom Robbins
I suffer from cacoethes loquendi, a mania or itch for talking, and from vanity . . . and morbidity, and, as is obvious to everyone who knows me, an inborn, an inveterate flair for histrionics. ... I am pachydermatous. ... I am a veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano on behalf of Democratic principles.
Henry Fountain Ashurst
Her Majesty's new Ministers proceeded in their career like a body of men under the influence of some deleterious drug. Not satiated with the spoilation and anarchy of Ireland, they began to attack every institution and every interest, every class and calling in the country...As time advanced it was not difficult to perceive that extravagance was being substituted for energy by the Government. The unnatural stimulus was subsiding. Their paroxysms ended in prostration. Some took refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.
Benjamin Disraeli
