Mark Twain Quotes

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

I feel the other element of a western is the land, which is very important in this movie. I mean the land is another character in the piece, actually.

There was a rock in front of my hut, a tall, gray rock. By its looks it seemed to be well-disposed toward me.

There are a lot of mountains with a lot of water.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

I like mountains, always have done. Big obstinate bits of rock sticking up where they're not wanted and getting in folk's way. Great. Climbing them is a different matter altogether though. I hate that.

Petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

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.

Pressure, no doubt, has always been a most important factor in the metamorphism of rocks; but there is, I think, at present some danger in over-estimating this, and representing a partial statement of truth as the whole truth. Geology, like many human beings, suffered from convulsions in its infancy; now, in its later years, I apprehend an attack of pressure on the brain.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give out attention to it

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

No house should ever be on any hill... It should be of the hill.

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

Leave no stone unturned in your quest to disrupt a rock garden.

Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain; Run the rapid and leap the fall, Split at the rock, and together again Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, And flee from folly on every side With a lover's pain to attain the plain, Far from the hills of Habersham, Far from the valleys of Hall.

On and on they flew, over the countryside parceled out in patches of green and brown, over roads and rivers winding through the landscapes like strips of matte and glossy ribbon.

Gold delights to walk through the very midst of the guard, and to break its way through hard rocks, more powerful in its blow than lightning.

Near the centre of that State of New York lies an extensive district of country, whose surface is a succession of hills and dales, or, to speak with greater deference to geographical definitions, of mountains and valleys.

Rose doesn’t like the flat country, but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.