Werner Herzog Quotes

The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us; but they lie back of all, and are the final source of all. ... Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape.

We have volcanoes also in our immediate neighborhood. I wish we didn't have to travel that far. Probably the kind of magnitude and awesome raw power of them is very fascinating, and of course it's very cinematic.

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.

The earth is a beautiful planet.

The reason you see so many volcanoes on Venus is partly due to the fact that there's virtually no erosion there. So on Venus, you're seeing features, some of which are hundreds of millions of years old on the surface. On Earth, we do not see any surface features nearly that old - you only see much more recent features.

One volcano in Hawaii, one volcano in Indonesia, produces enough gases in the atmosphere, which include those natural elements that are in the Earth's crust, that, uh, kind of make all the, you know, the science that we have about what we produce, moot.

Most of the volcanoes are pretty far away. You have to go to, God knows, Alaska. Or you have to go to the Southern Indies or you have to go to a specific island.

A volcano may be considered as a cannon of immense size.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

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

We are blessed with a place that is open to the universe and, despite this, supports this very thin envelope of air we call atmosphere, which holds just the right amount of oxygen for us to breathe.

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument--that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'--makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.

Of course the entire planet Earth consists of magma under us, and only the very inner-core is different.

Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Earth has not anything to show more fair.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

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.

Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.