Quotes about coral (28 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“You’re the captain. Get over the helm and start steering. Take control. There’s something going on here you can he a part of. You don’t have to see this thing run up on coral reefs, one time after another after another after another. This one is all yours. You’ve got it. And the clock is running. And it’s going to stop, invariably. But right now, you’re alive. Enjoy. Enjoy this existence. Enjoy this love. It is the deed of incredible compassion that you are here on the face of this earth. You have invested in many things. Maybe won, maybe lost. Maybe it’s time to invest in life because what you invest here will always he yours.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Montreal, Quebec, Canada, March 6, 1988
1980s

Love , Life , Time , Parting

“It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins.”

V.S. Naipaul book An Area of Darkness

An Area of Darkness (1964)

Death , History , Reading , Success

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”

William Shakespeare The Tempest

Ariel, Act I, scene ii.
The Tempest (1611)

Suffering , Change , Sea

“Coral reefs are farmers. They provide food, income and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Coral reefs are security guards. The structures that they build protect our shorelines from storm surge and waves, and the biological systems that they house filter the water and make it safer for us to work and play. Coral reefs are chemists. The molecules that we're discovering on coral reefs are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs. And coral reefs are artists. The structures that they build are some of the most beautiful things on planet Earth. And this beauty is the foundation of the tourism industry in many countries with few or little other natural resources.”

Kristen Marhaver American marine biologist

Source: How we're growing baby corals to rebuild reefs https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_marhaver_how_we_re_growing_baby_corals_to_rebuild_reefs (October 2015)

Housing , Search , Food , Country

“This mountain-ash, whose flower-fill'd boughs
Spread like a cloud at noon —
Whose shade is as a haunted place
For the sweet airs of June :
'Twas but a little shrub when first
I wreathed amid thy hair
Its berries, like the coral crown
That the sea-maidens wear.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(20th November 1824) Constancy
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Mountain , Flowers , Sea

“Cupid and my Campaspe play'd
At cards for kisses—Cupid paid:
He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows,
His mother's doves, and team of sparrows;
Loses them too; then down he throws
The coral of his lips, the rose
Growing one's cheek (but none knows how);
With these, the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin:
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last he set her both his eyes—
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love! has she done this for thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?”

John Lyly (1554–1606) English politician

Poem: Cupid and Campaspe.

Love , Kiss

“He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,—
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.”

Thomas Carew (1594–1640) English poet

Disdain Returned, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love , Star , Time

“From Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand.
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.”

Reginald Heber (1783–1826) English clergyman

" Missionary Hymn https://www.bartleby.com/294/37.html", st. 1 (1819).
Hymns

Error , Mountain

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)*

* The analogy between the sea squirt and the associate professor was first pointed out, I think, by the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Source: Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 177

Life , Home , Search , Thinking

“Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 15: In the Sierra Foot-Hills

Beauty , Way , Mountain , Learning

“On the island of New Georgia in the Solomons,
Stands a simple wooden cross alone to tell
That beneath the silent coral of the Solomons,
Sleeps a man, sleeps a man remembered well.”

Frank Loesser (1910–1969) American songwriter

The Ballad of Rodger Young http://www.wegrokit.com/shines.htm

Sleep

“Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

Book Review, 35 Harv. L. Rev. 479, 479 (1922) (reviewing Benjamin N. Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial Process).
Extra-judicial writings

Law , Past

“Many distinguishing features of the surface may often be ascribed to the operation at a remote era of slow and tranquil causes-to the gradual deposition of sediment in a lake or in the ocean, or to the prolific increase of testacea and corals therein.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 2
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men , Beauty , Hope , Nature

“The Maple puts her corals on in May,
While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling,
To be in tune with what the robins sing.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Sonnet, The Maple http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/archive/lowell.mhtml (1875)

Singing

“What do we mean when we speak…of higher and lower animals? …What too about communication (a respect in which, Wilson says, we much exceed the insects)? What is so good about communicating? How are we sure that it constitutes and excellence? Is it even clear that in respect we do exceed the corals and the colonial jellyfish? With them, there are no internal barriers; information flow freely from unit to unit wherever it is needed. The unrestrictedness of the communication much exceeds that among people. Why does this fail to impress us?”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 151.

People , Communication , Animals

“Why would the oldest tree on earth be less than 4,400 years old (and still growing)? Why would the oldest coral reef on earth (Great Barrier Reef in Australia) be less than 4,400 years old? Why would the largest cave formations be dated at less than 4,400 years old? Why would the oldest records of capital punishment, farming, writing, husbandry, and metallurgy be less than 4,400 years old? Why would the oldest known civilizations be advanced and appear to have sprung up out of nowhere? It’s almost as if very intelligent people coming from a stock of people getting off Noah’s ark who already had knowledge of scores of things just moved into an area and developed a civilization in a short time. There is no evidence of “upward advancement from apelike creatures to hunter-gatherers,” as books often teach. After the Flood it was sort of like a Gilligan’s Island situation. The people were very smart, but it would take a while to rebuild civilization after a global flood. The first settlers coming off the ark would be in an automatic “Stone Age” because it’s faster to make stone tools than steel ones.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 40

People , Books , Age , Intelligence

“Yet there is no gainsaying but that it must have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morning of creation, when it was young and fresh, when the feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust, nor the din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away. Life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human race, walking hand in hand with God under the great sky. They lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They took their simple wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled and talked and thought; and the great earth rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with trouble and wrong. Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; and human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult, doubt, and hope. Its age of restful peace is past. It has its work to finish and must hasten on. What that work may be—what this world's share is in the great design—we know not, though our unconscious hands are helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral insect working deep under the dark waters, we strive and struggle each for our own little ends, nor dream of the vast fabric we are building up for God.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love , Life , God , Age

“Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 114 (p. 1012)

Men , World , Heart

“The war hung over us like a storm cloud. […] They told us how the animals escaped from the zoo after the bombing raid and rushed about the streets. They fled not from people, but to people, and, let's say, the bear roared and shook its paw, the ostrich waved a burnt wing, and the elephant knelt, lifted its trunk and trumpeted plaintively. But what could people do when the earth was burning beneath them? A coral aspid, a very venomous and beautiful snake, slithered up to the sixth floor and meekly curled up under someone's bed. And in these stories about the ruins of great cities, about streets where African reptiles creep and dying elephants trumpet, there was something from Wells and from the Apocalypse — more generally from legends about the end of the world and the total destruction of humanity.”

Yury Dombrovsky (1909–1978) Soviet writer

Russian text
The Monkey Comes for His Skull (1943)

War , People , World , Beauty

“Thus, we have three principles for increasing adequacy of data: if you must work with a single object, look for imperfections that record historical descent; if several objects are available, try to render them as stages of a single historical process; if processes can be directly observed, sum up their effects through time. One may discuss these principles directly or recognize the “little problems” that Darwin used to exemplify them: orchids, coral reefs, and worms—the middle book, the first, and the last.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Worm for a Century, and All Seasons", p. 132
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Books , Problem , Time

“When we had been in Ashenstovo [1873, located near the Prussian border]] a few days my mother took us children to see a famous Polish church, Kostjol, famous for its miraculous Madonna icon. This icon had three precious coats, one of gold, one of coral and one with pearls and diamonds... Many peasant men and women were were lying prostrate on the floor as if crucified, with their arms outstretched. It was very quiet. Suddenly a great blare of trumpets shattered the silence. Terribly frightened I saw the gold curtain open and the Madonna appear wearing a gold robe.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from his 'Memories', in 'Catalogue Raisonné of the oil Paintings', ed. Maria Jawlensky, Angelica Jawlensky and Lucia Pieroni-Jawlensky; published resp. in 1991, 1992, 1993
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p.274

Women , Men , Children , Lying

“Right after the Flood, as all of the water went down, all of the decayed plant matter would have made the water very high in minerals and decayed plant and animal life would have been high in nutrients to make anything to grow. Food would have been readily available with all of the rotting carcasses of the vegetation and the animals. The coral could have grown much faster under these conditions, then it would have slowed down to its current rate. People who have studied coral reefs say that they could have been formed in four to five thousand years with no problem. If the earth is older than that, why aren’t the the coral reefs much larger? Their rate of growth indicates a young age for the earth.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Life , People , Age , Food

“You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being?”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)
Context: You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being? No wonder, then, that an infinite amount of incessantly moving and changing matter makes up the few animals, vegetables and minerals that we see. No wonder, either, that if you throw dice a hundred times, they will all show the same numbers at some point.
This movement of matter, then, could not fail to produce something, and whatever it is will always be admired by the unthinking person who does not realize how close it came to not being made.

Way , Flowers , Personality

“What's happening in the world and in the ocean has changed our time horizon. We can be incredibly pessimistic on the short term, and mourn what we lost and what we really took for granted. But we can still be optimistic on the long term, and we can still be ambitious about what we fight for and what we expect from our governments, from our planet. Corals have been living on planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They're badasses. An individual coral can go through tremendous trauma and fully recover if it's given a chance and it's given protection. Corals have always been playing the long game, and now so are we.”

Kristen Marhaver American marine biologist

Source: Why I still have hope for coral reefs https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_marhaver_why_i_still_have_hope_for_coral_reefs (April 2017)

Chance , Time , Game , World

“I think we should be snorkeling and swimming on reefs. Because I think people only develop a passion for protecting things if they know what is at risk. I would hardly be one to say that we shouldn’t go near them. That said, its important to manage tourism properly. If you have a lot of people going onto reefs, stepping on reefs, collecting things from reefs, breaking corals off, or throwing anchors on top of reefs, that’s not good. It’s important to properly manage the numbers of people and their behavior when they’re in water. It’s also important to make sure that the hotels that support that tourism have good water treatment for the sewage that they release, and that they aren’t also feeding this large population of visitors critically important reef fish. That is ecologically sound tourism. But you can’t just let it develop willy-nilly. It has to be managed carefully. Otherwise, you end up with lots of people and not much reef.”

Nancy Knowlton (1949) American biologist

Source: Nancy Knowlton https://web.archive.org/web/20081008104046/http://www.smithsonianmag.com:80/specialsections/ocean-hall/atm-qa-200809.html (September 2008)

Support , People , Water , Thinking

“Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

“Like coral insects multitudinous
The minutes are whereof our life is made.
They build it up as in the deep's blue shade
It grows, it comes to light, and then, and thus
For both there is an end.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

"Work", line 1, p. 54.
The Monitions of the Unseen (1871)

Light , Life